Strange and fascinating story told in an extraordinary style
Deep in the storage rooms of the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre a few years ago, the French director Renaud Herbin discovered a box of treasures, in the shape of the tiny puppets and set designs created in 1936 by the legendary Slovenian puppet master Milan Klemencic, for a show called The Owl Castle. The original story, by 19th-century courtier-puppeteer Franz Pocci, is a meditation on human ambition and over-reaching, built around the tale of a knight who has been transformed into an owl as punishment for his cruelty and violence.
The owl knows, though, both that his feathers have a magical superpower to grant wishes to those who pluck them and that, when they have all been plucked, he will turn back into a man; so when he meets an ambitious chap called Kasperl they form a partnership that soon sees Kasperl rising to high ministerial office.
Inherbin’snewversionofthe tale, scripted by Celia Houdart for Ljubljana Puppet Theatre and the Centre Dramatique National d’alsace in France, the story is told in extraordinary style by performers Maja Kunsic and Iztok Luzar, with the tiny puppet theatre gradually opening out into something like a small film sound stage, the audience moving around it as the story evolves, tiny cameras relaying images from different angles onto small screens and the performers themselves sometimes moving out of puppeteer mode, to embody the characters and ideas of the story. On the downside, I’ver rarely seen a promenade show in more desperate need of a pair of discreet stewards, to help the audiencemovesmoothlyfrom scene to scene, or of a supply of lightweight stools to help audience members sit down out of each others sightlines.
These technical irritations only matter, though, because every aspect of this show is so strange and fascinating that it seems painful to miss any of it. The songs, exquisitely sung by Kunsic, are as beautiful as the tiny puppets themselves; and Pocci’s story echoes through the years, from the 1860s to the 1930s to the present day, with a tale which suggests both how the casual abuse of political power leads back towards cruel authoritarianism and how humankind’s inability to curb its own greed brings the destruction of the natural magic on which we depend, for our very lives.
This week’s Manipulate Festival of visual theatre also brought a visit from the Russian group Samoloet, now based in France, who offered a poignant and wordless 50-minute reflection on the emotional landscape of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, featuring a disappojntingly abrupt ending but also a subtle and melancholy soundscape, three fine performers, and some truly unforgettable images, including a haunting sequence in which a discarded photograph album, with the pictures ripped out, becomes –undershiftinglight – the shell of the sisters’ abandoned house.
The festival’s rich programme of Scottish-made work ended with two joyous performances of Two Destination Language’s 75-minute show Fault Lines, created by Katherina Radeva and Alister Lownie with six terrific female performers, and designed to explore themes of freedom and belonging, exile and selfacceptance, in the form of a fashion show.
What’s more, there are six different soundtracks, from whichtheaudience–equipped with an app and headphones – can choose; some involve talk about language and belonging, one involves classical music, and there’s a terrific key mix-tape of “guilty pleasures” female pop.
And all the while, the six women on stage are marching and pouting and flouncing and dancing and interacting with themselves and each other, in ways that speak wordless volumes about the lives of 21st-century women struggling to find freedom and selfbelief under pressures that range from poverty and war to everyday sexism and racism. The result is pure joy; and the sense of freedom that only comes when we bring our pure creativity to bear on the world around us, and succeed in shifting it, ever so slightly, on its axis.
JOYCE MCMILLAN
Manipulate Festival now over. Manipulate 2021 will take place next January and February at Summerhall, Edinburgh, and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow.