Ornithology, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh

Dance critic

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Let's go for the plusses first, which are the two performers, Lucy Deacon and Moritz Linkmann, who work together as Strangebird Zirkus.

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Mary Brennan

They make back-flipping acrobatics and scaling the vertical height of a Chinese pole look as effortless as walking; but more than that, they share a flair for expressively nuanced clowning and spot-on comic timing. When you ally those skills to the acts of aerial prowess, the potential for storytelling on several levels really gets off the ground, as it were.

Sadly, what brings that promise back down to earth with a dull thud is the archly over-egged script (by Laura Bridgeman) and the curiously plodding direction (by Ben Harrison). An intriguing idea – where Deacon is a feral recluse in an exotic wilderness, Linkmann is the oddball travelling salesman who strays on to her patch, and their encounter is "observed" as if it's the stuff of a TV nature programme, becoming mired in the cod-academic pronouncements on "animal behaviour" that Patricia Kavanagh's watcher-on-the-sly has to deliver in tones of pukka-plumminess.These could be sunstituted with an ambient soundscore – we had all been encumbered with headphones using "silent disco" technology – but judging by the amount of furtive adjusting going on around me, this was more hindrance than help. And what the verbiage and headsets actually suggested was a lack of trust in the artists to communicate this tale of two eccentric outcasts unexpectedly finding a mate. By the end, the finesse of Deacon and Linkmann was brought low by a clumsy framework – so use your eyes, not your ears, when this touring show comes to The Arches in Glasgow on Thursday.HH

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Ornithology, Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh

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