Manipulate

Fisk/Whispers/Poli Degaine

Traverse, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

four stars

EVERYTHING about this 10th anniversary Manipulate Festival of visual theatre – the live shows, animation programmes, workshops and outreach projects – is a fine reminder of how astute planning, hard work and a welcome degree of artistic ambition can draw in eager new audiences and create opportunities for emerging practitioners.

The young Edinburgh company, Tortoise In A Nutshell, didn’t exist when Manipulate first came on stream. Now its latest production, Fisk – devised with Danish company Teater Katapult and in association with the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling – was Manipulate’s opening night salute to how Scottish companies are gaining international clout.

Fisk opens with a calm, poetic beauty that belies the turbulent journey ahead. For its lone sailor (Alex Bird) is really cast adrift in waves of depression and as the floorcloth begins to billow and heave around his wee white paper boat, his suicidal intention becomes clear. Before he can make that leap, however, a fabulous force of nature invades his space – a vibrant, greeny-shimmering female fish who is decidedly flirty and frisky. What follows is a cross between delusion and reality, as the Fish (a lithely playful Arran Howie) sloughs off bits of costume to become the Man’s human partner, trying to entice him away from his corrosive despondency. Daft fun – balloons, bubbles and disco boogie-moves – spins into dark despair, as the Man’s increasingly bleak mental state, tellingly expressed in Bird’s anguished physicality, threatens to pull him under. It’s a challenging narrative, delivered with pleasing design details and quirks of humour. Fisk nonetheless refrains from sugar-coating the very real pain and misery of this couple’s relationship, and that kind of honesty impresses as much as the beguiling look and sound of this production. Look out for it on the forthcoming tour.

In 2008, at the first-ever Manipulate, Compagnie Mossoux-Bonte, from Belgium, were harbingers of what (we hoped) lay ahead for the festival. That earlier production, Light, was a tour-de-force of shadow-play and shape-shifting deceptions. Whispers, their current show, sees Nicole Mossoux again morphing with seemingly boneless agility from one form to another, as if her body was a conduit for all manner of homeless, wandering souls. The soundscore creaks, crunches and screeches with a nightmarish brutality, while Mossoux – with a deft twitch of her costume, a dislocation of her limbs – portrays echoes of past griefs, seductions, abuses and even Vermeer-like poised domesticity. Sometimes grotesquely unpleasant, but never less than compelling.

However you care to name him – Punch, Petrouchka, Polichinelle – the rascally puppet, beloved across centuries by audiences worldwide, couldn’t wish for wittier, nimbler hands than those of Estelle Charlier and Romauld Collinet of Compagnie La Pendue (France). Their take on this innately anarchic character makes Poli Degaine into an affectionate nod towards tradition, sparked through with modern overtones of Tarantino and a dash of existential elan – in all, a roguish rollercoaster of murder, mayhem and mirth where the couple’s own interactions with the audience add yet another layer of clever fun. Even Death is no match for Polichinelle’s aggressive lust for life – or for the hand-in-glove virtuosity of Compagnie La Pendue. Simply brilliant.