Shows old and new offer the chance to travel the world from your home, writes Joyce Mcmillan
There’s a stage, a woman in jeans and a jacket, a microphone, a spotlight, a high stool; and after a bit of a standup-comedy-style introduction, she is telling us a story – very human, infinitely recognisable – about how she gets her key out of her bag, and unlocks her front door. After about three minutes, she finishes the story, ends the show, and quietly begins to take off her smart stage shoes and replace then with comfortable socks and a pair of trainers; while she does this, the camera pulls back, and begins to swirl around the stage space, revealing other performers coming and going around the woman.
It’s a measure of Zoo Venues’ increasing importance on the Fringe that Ghent-based company Ontroerend Goed chose Zoo Southside for last year’s UK premiere of their stunningly-staged wordless show Are We Not Drawn Onward To New Era, with its palindromic title and structure – first forward through human history, then back again. Now, they have joined this year’s ZOO TV online programme with Loopstation (✪✪✪✪); but while it is a very different show, the eloquence of the minutely choreographed staging – with its everyday modern lives sliding past each other through an hour of stress, change, and occasional quiet contentment – seems as powerful as any of the company’s greatest work.
In an introduction, the company’s director, Alexander Devriendt, talks about how Loopstation was originally intended as a kind of tribute to the everyday detail of things, and a meditation on how we might recover from our destructive addiction to perpetual economic growth if we were able to take more pleasure in the Zen of ordinary living. He also talks about how the experience of the pandemic has brought these small, precious details of life to the fronts of our minds.
Yet there’s a melancholy to this vision, in the context of the company’s previous work, that makes it seem more like a final snapshot of a comfortable western way of life that may not be with us much longer; a sadness reinforced by Joris Blanckaert’s haunting score for unaccompanied female voices, fading to silence.
Loopstation is just one of many theatrical treats available on ZOO TV, with new shows released every day, including an exclusive live performance of The Boxing Baroness, by brilliant poet and Fringe star Luke Wright, promised for Saturday evening.
You can also experience the rare intensity of 2012 Fringe First winner La Merda (✪✪✪✪), a remarkable in-your-face stream of consciousness in which actress Silvia Gallerano, stark naked for an hour on a metal plinth, explores all the contemporary and historical political shit that passes through the mind of a young actress on the verge of a vital audition. With writer and performer Francesca Millican Slater, in Imber: You Walk Through (✪✪✪), you can take a beautiful and disturbing, if slightly soft-edged, walk around the village of Imber, on the Wiltshire Downs, which is now used as a training ground for British soldiers preparing for conflict in war zones across the world.
For a show that really takes western society by the throat, though, the one to watch is London-based company Imitating The Dog’s superb new vision of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (
reimagined for an age when the truth of Empire can no longer be described entirely from a white point of view, however visionary and appalled. In this new version, created by the company, we see five actors – three white and two black – argue over and tear apart Conrad’s text, layering it with cultural references from Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, to Apocalypse Now, Frances Ford Coppola’s gamechanging film version of the story.
They make the hero a woman; and perhaps even more crucially, send our heroine from her glittering, civilised home city of Kinshasa into a future Europe devastated by internecine war, where old autobahns snake through a blighted landscape of work-camps savagely policed by teenage militias.
It’s a hugely powerful 21st century vision of Conrad’s story; and although watching on screen cannot match its impact in a live theatre, this 100-minute film is still well worth viewing, for the sheer power of its thought, emotion, artistry, and magnificent ensemble work, on one of the key themes of our time.
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Zoo TV continues until tonight, with shows available on catch up for seven days after their first broadcast. www.zoofestival.co.uk