Theatre
Butterfly, Arches, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
Oscar Wilde isn't one of the direct sources that inspired this exquisite, harrowing piece of visual theatre from writer/ director and performer Ramesh Meyyappan - he names those as the short story, Madame Butterfly, by John Luther Long and the character of Vladimir Nabokov who was an ardent, perhaps even obsessed, lepidopterist. Even so, it's a line from Wilde - "Yet each man kills the thing he loves..."- that resonates, relentlessly, as this Butterfly flutters haplessly to her doom.
We see her first as a bright, if somewhat shy, independent being who makes and sells kites. You soon gather, from the excessive number of kites he buys, that the Customer (Martin McCormick) would rather have the sweet-faced, naive Butterfly (Ashley Smith) instead. If she seems oblivious of his wooing, she is equally unprepared for the arrival of Meyyappan's character, Nabokov: she falls for him. Just how hard she falls is echoed in the way her little abode, previously a safe haven of ribbons, cloth and kite-frames, gives way to his shelves of collecting jars. The relationship incenses the Customer, his response is brutal. Brush the bloom from a butterfly, it will lose the ability to fly.
No words are ever spoken aloud in Butterfly. Instead the nuanced body language, the use of mime and puppets, make feelings and intentions absorbingly clear while the recurring imagery - of capturing and killing a butterfly, pinning it down to put on display - builds into a harsh visual metaphor of how both men stamp possessive ownership on an easily crushed woman. David Paul Jones's ravishing music is like a lyrical-litmus, underpinning the narrative's mood shifts while the cast bring more than physical finesse to every detail of the movement - they show a compelling emotional integrity.
Butterfly is part of the Manipulate festival, in Aberdeen on Saturday and Edinburgh's Traverse on Thursday February 5
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