Blam!
Three office workers (Didier Oberle, Lars Gregersen and the play's creator, producer and writer Kristjan Ingimarsson) sit at their desks in a conventional office, each in their own sectioned-off cubicle. Their jobsworth manager (Janus Elsig) sits on a raised platform upstage, like an office overseer. The mundane drone of office life, with the sounds of typing, incoherent chatter and even the loud bubbles from the water cooler, hums on for what seems like forever.
Finally we start to see some horseplay from the three compadres through laughter and the lobbing of scrunched up pieces of paper. Yet still no dialogue has yet been uttered (nor will there be since this is a wordless play soon to be unveiled as physical theatre of explosive proportions). The left-out boss tries jealously to pretend he¹s having more fun first, and then tries to spoil theirs before admitting defeat and joining in.
Once the boss is finally accepted into the inner circle the result is a high-octane series of impressive acrobatics, as each of our characters make-believes they are a superhero, with Matrix-style slow motion reflexes, ninja moves, leaps, rolls, dives and even dangling from the overhead lights
– all in time to a soundtrack that could have easily been culled from Hollywood action movie archives. Meanwhile almost every piece of office equipment is imaginatively used in some way, including the use of a hat stand as a chain gun with realistic machine gunfire sounds to boot.
Each action sequence is broken up by frequent reversions back to their daily routine until the final climax to the tune of AC/DC's "Highway To Hell", where our four friends fully embody the very characters they were trying to emulate.
No need to ask then why it's called Blam!. Those with a lads sense of humour will think it the best play ever produced but perhaps for the rest of us it should include the disclaimer: 'some may find this all a bit too laddish'. But with such death-defying acts of agility and strength Ingimarsson, who fronts the Danish-based theatre company Neander, deserves high praise for blurring the lines between dance, drama and comedy in such an original way.
– Will Stone
