The Told By An Idiot company formed in the early 1990s around an
interest in using the performance techniques of clowning to achieve
poignant or outright tragic effects. No weeping Pierrots here, but
rather the clown’s simplicity: an innocence and openness that first
wins your heart, then breaks it as you watch them buffeted by events or
just the way of the world. Hayley Carmichael, in particular, has often
seemed in her career to have a hotline to an audience’s collective
heart. This show (the company’s first two-hander, and also amazingly
their first visit to the Barbican) includes less blatant winsomeness
than some, but nevertheless contains much that is cute, in the senses
both of endearing and
acute.
Carmichael and co-founder Paul Hunter have adapted (along with director
Matthew Dunster) Michel Faber’s story about a pair of twins growing up
in the Arctic with their anthropologist parents, or more usually left
alone by them. The company’s method works well here, as the children
approach the world directly: trying to understand it or influence it,
acquiring knowledge and fashioning rituals for themselves... a
microcosm, if their parents would but look, of the anthropological and
ethological issues they are studying in the indigenous people.
The Arctic waste is a
tabula rasa
for the twins to write their version of the world upon, as they journey
across it to lay their dead mother to rest. Naomi Wilkinson’s set, too,
is a blank white space, all coated in fur – floor, walls, stools, a
large slide – a surrealist touch reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim’s fur
teacup. Nothing superfluous is contained in the 80-minute piece: no
more is said or done than needs to be. Admittedly, some of the
associations are far from obvious even on reflection, such as the
soundtrack: I can understand the inclusion of a Saami
yoik, and the atmospheric quality
of Catalani’s aria
Ebben? Ne
andrò lontana, but the several mid-1970s pop/rock numbers
mystify me somewhat. Still, in their portrayals Hunter and Carmichael
manage at once to be inventive and yet to allow nothing to come between
their characters and our connection with them. Ultimately the story
resolves into a simple, downbeat coming-of-age fable; but neither in
Faber’s writing nor in Told By An Idiot’s performance does “simple”
mean “trivial”.
Written for the Financial
Times.