Circa: The Return – (Barbican Centre)
All it takes is a wall: burnished steel, bolted together at the back of the stage. It's instantly recognisable: a perimeter fence or a border barrier. The one keeps people in, the other keeps them out. It's the West Bank. It's Berlin. It's Mexico, Hungary, Calais, Turkey – any one of the 65 five standing in the world today, keeping people apart, curtailing their freedom.
Just by its presence onstage, the wall transforms Circa's performers. Stood in front of it, the six men and women dressed in grey become the world's dispossessed, its migrants and refugees. They stare out at us blankly, both pleading and accusatory, and their bodies start to twist. Hips swivel. Spines skew. Joints rotate in their sockets. These human figures slowly contort and mutate, until bit by bit, they lose their shape. Some grow freakish, some deform. Others combine into zygotes. One by one, they become almost inhuman – at least, director Yaron Lifschitz dares us to see them as such. It's a small step from a refugee crisis to a final solution, he warns; a slippery, slippery slope.
The Return takes its start from Claudio Monteverdi's opera Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, sung from the side of the stage by Robert Murray and Kate Howden – sometimes straight, sometimes shuffled, and sometimes roughed up as electronica in Quincy Jones's arrangements. Framed as a piece about distance, separation and home – Ulysses miles from his native Ithaca, his wife Penelope waiting for him – Lifschtiz picks up Monteverdi's themes and transposes them onto images of migration.
The Return is circus filled up with pain: bodies pushed to their breaking points, straining at the edge of imbalance. A woman folds herself up like origami, tucking toes beneath her chin, bending her back into an arch. A man launches into a backflip then lands like a bellyflop; his chest scudding into the floor so hard that you'd swear ribs must have cracked. You see ankles sprain and shoulders strain; people walking, full-weight, on the tops of their feet. Bridie Hooper hangs disjointedly from aerial straps, then snaps taut like a gallows drop. Nicole Faubert holds herself up on a clump of steel poles, one slip from a goring. You realise, time and again, that you're holding your breath.
It's about strength too, though: the will too keep moving, to keep holding one another up. Pairs cross the stage via slow-motion acrobatics: each hauling the other the next step of the way. They bear one another's weight for as long as they can stand; women lifting men as often as not.
The Return's a hard watch though – and not just because it's so wince-inducing. Lifschitz keeps things Spartan and austere; grinding feats of endurance over grand, flighty spectacles. You sometimes have to squint to see the level of difficulty involved. Standard hand-to-hand routines are performed without eye contact, a mark of distance and dislocation between partners that makes an intimate act seem parched and sexless. Individually, routines hit their targets, but together they're repetitive and relentless, and, as fitting as that is, it can feel uncompromising. The stakes aren't always kept up and the images aren't all so expressive.
What Lifschitz never finds is a real, felt connection to the music. It sits like a soundtrack on top of the action, and it's staged as such too, tacked on at the side, in another register altogether. It's enough to intrude on the overall atmosphere, to pull focus from the physical pain – but then maybe that's the point. Does art – and grand art like opera in particular – distract us from the realities of the world? Might it be a barrier in its own way?
The Return runs at the Barbican Centre until 31 January.
