It goes almost without saying now that by “Mime”, the London International Mime Festival basically means “everything whose principal mode of communication is not spoken”. Here we have one show of dance and dominos, one of tickets on a tabletop. Both are ultimately concerned with cherishing and remembering everyday moments, but they differ radically in scale and approach, and I think significantly in impact.

Anna Nilsson of Belgian company Baba Fish conceived Expiry Date around the final hour of an old man’s life. Other performers personify his memories of his younger self, his late wife and even his disease, in episodes of physical theatre interspersed by sequences of collapsing dominoes usually triggered by a remarkable, complex Heath Robinson sprawl of machinery (designed by Nilsson’s father): I kept wondering when I should shout “Mouse Trap!” It’s a remarkably intricate vision as well as a thoughtful and physically demanding one.  However, it doesn’t necessarily get its point across, either as regards what is happening or why.

Xavier Bobés from Barcelona approaches his audience much more directly, not least because there are only five of us at a time. Having escorted us into a tiny room off the Festival Hall’s downstairs foyer (and this time the cliché is true: it actually is normally used as a toilet), Bobés sits us around a table on which he builds a panorama of memories of his home city in 1942 and thereafter. Rather than dominoes or human bodies, his materials are little everyday items: photographs, yes, but also coins, pocket calendars, tiny toys, key fobs, even old ration books. (The title Things Easily Forgotten comes from the personal-information page in a Spanish pocket diary.) He accompanies himself with old vinyl records, chats to us and enrols us in the performance with torches and boxes of items presented to us. (We’re also set an algebra problem, which none of my quintet got right.) He too constructs an imaginary history for a central couple, but what brings this hour or so alive is the palpable, concrete sense of the world in which they moved, the mundane detritus they would have amassed and discarded without another thought.

Written for the Financial Times.