This visually haunting work tells a touching, fractured tale of absence and regret through moving music, startling images and visual wonder. Intimate and arresting, Toujours et Pres de Moi is a world premiere and the first UK production from critically acclaimed international performance company Opera Erratica. Live physical theatre, Victorian theatrical illusion and the latest video technology combine to create a dislocated performance space in which puppet-sized holograms interact with their live, life-sized selves. Meanwhile lush Renaissance madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo are mixed with startling contemporary vocal pieces by Salvatore Sciarrino, Christopher Fox and James Weeks, adding to the sense of past/present dislocation. Toujours et Pres de Moi promises audiences a challenging and haunting new theatrical experience exploring presence and absence, memory and loss, connection and separation.
When a 'holographic' vision of rapper Tupac Shakur appeared at the Coachella festival last month, it was the modern application of a Victorian illusion called Pepper's Ghost, a trick beloved of nineteenth-century showmen and spiritualists.
In west London's cramped Print Room theatre, Opera Erratica director Patrick Eakin Young is using exactly the same technique - in a far less bombastic fashion - in this original work for two illusory characters and their live human counterparts.
Two actors, Klas Lagerlund and Anna Martine, impassively watch their parallel selves in miniature, playing out a fractured relationship. Completely wordless (our ears are filled with Renaissance madrigals), the mood flickers between whimsy, melancholy and muted resignation as their story is interrupted by fleeting visions of another woman - a lover perhaps, or a lost child.
Young gets full marks for optical illusion. When some clutching fingers appear, reaching out of a wooden box, it's startlingly realistic. And as a vehicle to express the fallibility and flimsiness of memory, and the way our history haunts us, this is a genius technique. But the content is slim. Once you've marvelled at these small figures for a while, do you care what happens to them? Not enough.
Whatsonstage.com - Discount London theatre tickets, theatre news and reviews, Theatre videos, Theatre discussion, National Theatre Listings. Covering London's West End, all of Theatreland and all UK theatre. The best
for London Theatre Ticket Discounts.
