Performance Splinters Arches, Glasgow *** Even before the show begins, there's reason to get excited: Splinters is the end-of-year outcome of a brand new course, a Diploma in Physical Theatre, that is being taught at the Arches and SYT in Glasgow (with validation from the Adam Smith College in Fife).
This first batch of graduates, 18 in all, have spent a year exploring professional skills that previously they would have had to pursue outside of Scotland. With just over a dozen short pieces running in quick succession, Splinters is rather like a sampler for the kind of delights we expect to find on the Edinburgh Fringe.
Some merry tomfoolery, vignettes of intensely symbolic and Expressionistic movement, darkly evocative story-telling where poetic text is strikingly amplified through orchestrated gesture and ensemble patterning and visual jokes with a robustly ribald commedia del arte humour - they all sped by, devised by the performers under the direction of Al Seed (who readily pointed out that it was all their own work).
Judging by the hoots of laughter or calls of "bravo" everyone in the audience had their personal favourites. But Piotr Kurjata has the kind of slithery, chameleon physicality we've relished in the work of Derevo while Robyn Hembrook's take on Angela Carter's The Erl King allowed her chorus of five women to frame her words with well-judged actions.
Wicked humour abounded right to the end, where the Bride (Florencia Garcia Chaufan) got ridiculously aroused by descriptions of food while surrounded by figures sporting comically huge white phalluses and dancing in chorus-line formations a la Busby Berkeley.
There's more, much more to applaud and enjoy.
Splinters runs until Saturday.
