There was dancing on gravestones and pointless protests, as the festival got theatrical, writes Peter Crawley
Hang on a second. Does the co-production between Catastrophe theatre company and Chrysalis Dance, performed in and around St Nicholas's church, actually begin with performers dancing on people's graves? The large ancient stone slabs underfoot certainly look like a final resting place from long ago, but you'd have to be unusually sensitive to consider it sacrilege. Rather, it's the movements - artificial, broad and exaggerated - that are confusing.
Does this qualify as dance? As the summer downpour eases into a benignly temperate drizzle, the problem with Love and Other Disguises, by Colm Maher, is that, like the weather, this "theatre dance" show can't seem to make up its mind. Every audience must learn the language of a production as it goes along, but Paul Hayes's production never fully merges its two idioms. After the broad street theatre-like opening, in which a sailor seeks refuge for a crime he did not commit, dresses up as a vicar and gets hauled into conducting a wedding service, we meet the manic bride, her devastatingly beautiful but unlucky in love bridesmaid, and a cold-footed groom. The church acoustics (never designed for conversation) render them largely indecipherable, however, and its aisles are not hospitable to Judith Sibley's professed "off-balance" choreography, robbing the performers of precision. The collaboration between the two companies never seems to fit: a lengthy but rather contented pas de deux between the bride and her intended, set to a Mundy song, ignores the tensions established in the dialogue and, throughout, the choreography performs no narrative function - it is dance for dance's sake. Few could resent the neat symmetries of Maher's simple plotting or fail to be amused by the cartoonish wit of Patrick O'Donnell's cop, but neither the text nor the movement ever seem to trust each other.
Comparisons are invidious, but the makers of such a production might learn from Circa, the Australian company who have taken their astonishing circus skills - which you might call "on-balance" choreography - and employed them to create a wordless and effortlessly moving narrative, The Space Between. The grammar of acrobatics has changed very little over the centuries, but the phrases that wind through director Yaron Lifschitz's production feel freshly coined.
Performed over an eclectic yet brilliantly matched jumble of music - from the torch songs of Jacques Brel to the aggressive electronic fracture of Aphex Twin - and offered to us in a haze of muted lighting and scattered video projections, Circa never grant themselves a 'tah-dah' moment. You gasp at their tumbles, their lifts, or the moment when - and I don't think I imagined this - one performer springs into three summersaults from a lying position. But nothing seems like a trick. As a love triangle emerges between the tumbles and trapeze feats of Circa's three magnificent performers - David Carberry, Darcy Grant and Chelsea McGuffin - the relationship shot through with confrontation and heartache, you have to continually remind yourself it is a piece of circus, until genre distinctions become meaningless and we are absorbed into the immensity of its art.
What do we want from our comedians? We certainly expect them to amuse us (unless our expectations are particularly low). Increasingly, though, we expect them to be provocative, to work off our antagonisms and, crucially, to say and do the things that we ourselves cannot. Mark Thomas, the British comic agitator, does all the above and it is clearly playing havoc with his job title. "I don't know exactly what I do any more," he tells us from the stage of the Radisson's ballroom. Is he a comedian, a journalist, a protester, a campaigner or even a lobbyist? Whatever he is, Thomas certainly knows how to generate his own material. This show, a lengthy two-parter, begins with his response to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, a dreadful law in Britain designed to curb protests in central London. Some have criticised this law by openly disobeying it. But Thomas has criticised this law by flagrantly obeying it: describing his blossoming relationship with PC Paul McInally - a salty Scot who handles the maddening administration the law demands - Thomas relates his various legally sanctioned public demonstrations . . . beginning with a campaign to reduce police paperwork.
The reductio ad absurdum is a stealthy and fun tactic known to the debater and the comic alike and it becomes Thomas's main riff. Though he enjoys the frivolousness of having 150 individual protesters file 150 separate forms to hold 150 simultaneous protests on 150 largely nonsensical issues, you never doubt his absolute seriousness of purpose. What you learn about Thomas, though, is more interesting. Between the crusades and the right-on commentary, his own conflicts seep out; that of a working-class comedian now living in South London with a family, a garden and an espresso machine, unsure of how he fits in with a succession of anarchist "mates". You suspect that's why he's so fond of PC McInally, the unofficial star of the show, whom he regards more as a person than a badge, and why his next crusade against the torture methods enabled by the arms industry concludes with such hard-won personal satisfaction: that a relatively small but doggedly persistent local effort can have a relatively small but cheeringly global effect.
