1927 (the company) were first seen in
2007 (the year). Their show
Between
The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea established the template for
what has come since: the dark side of English whimsy, like a nightmare
Hermione Gingold narrating tales in which live figures interact with
Expressionist/Constructivist video animations and music from the kind
of Weimar-era cabaret best avoided. The company has subsequently
enjoyed international success with
The
Animals And Children Took To The Streets and even fashioned a
production of
The Magic Flute
for Berlin’s Komische Oper; their new work comes to London from
co-producers the Salzburg Festival. And it’s a bleak, delightful,
antique, topical treat in every way.
2014 has seen the centenary not just of the outbreak of World War One,
but of the publication of Gustav Meyrink’s take on the Golem mythos. In
Meyrink’s version the clay man stalks through a disjointed, Kafkaesque
Prague; in Suzanne Andrade’s dramatisation, her protagonist Robert
Robertson lives in a similarly trippy-yet-hyperreal modern city,
part-London, part-L.A., part-everywhere. The roughly human-shaped clay
figure he buys as a labour-saving device begins to show independent
thought, then to offer “advice” which is really direction, with all the
smoothness of an Iago. Soon Robert and his family are living the vapid,
consumerist lifestyle favoured by the Golem’s new corporate masters. If
Golem 1.0 was something of an iSore, Golem 2.0 is a higher-tech iFul
and Golem 3.0 so pervasive that it is indistinguishable from the “I” of
identity.
Yes, this is a parable about the perils of passive techno-consumerism
and the illusion of choice. But it makes its point in a manner that is
both mordant and deliciously sly. It incorporates nods to figures
ranging from playwrights Karel Čapek and Friedrich Dürrenmatt to punk
diva Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex… even, in the claymation of
Golem 1.0, to early Aardman Animation hero Morph. Paul Barritt’s films
are more colourful than before as well as more complex, and for the
first time the company use performers beyond their core quartet, but
all of whom look like offcuts. You won’t find a smarter piece of fun,
whose grin contains an unsettling gleam of fang.
Written for the Financial
Times.