As part of the Voila! Europe Festival, the Stigma Collective are back for the second year running to perform their show - ‘Right Left With Heels’. Originally scheduled to do the ‘live’ component of the festival at London’s Cockpit Theatre (many other shows being online this year), they were hit with Lockdown 2 less than two weeks before they were due to perform, swiftly adapting by filming the piece in the theatre and streaming it to their audience in a Zoom ‘watch party’ format - followed by a bookclub-style discussion afterwards.
The concept behind the piece is highly original - even within the remit of the Absurdist genre - the main protagonists being a pair of shoes. Since being the custom-made possessions of the unofficial first lady of Nazi Germany, Magda Goebels - following her suicide to avoid Red Army extermination - they survived, were dug up and arrested, sentenced at the Neuremberg Trials, and forced into exile “in the name of the United Nations”. What follows is a repeated cycle of the various subsequent owners: Svetna a young woman who makes them walk miles prior to engaging in intimate relations with her fiance; a doctor’s wife who kept them underwater for a traumatising thirteen hours; and Teresa, a filterless cigarette-smoking “terrible” dancer, before (a little confusingly) returning back to Magda again.
The piece is a two-hander (or footer perhaps?) with Rosa French and Francesca Isherwood playing the respective shoes. Dressed in silk pyjamas we are reminded that these two had a glamorous life in their early days of Nazi rule before ‘falling foul’ to the clutches of democracy and freedom. Through well paced narration, we are drawn in to the developing intricacies of their story, with some well-constructed Physical Theatre sequences as their accounts become more graphic. The vocal and physical elements of the piece blend effectively, with Absurdist dialogue and Expressionist movement skilfully incorporated - speaking and moving often with a precision and synchronicity which strangely humanises the shoes. They are individual personalities but at the same time cut from the same cloth, so to speak.
And that ‘cloth’ reminds us of the horrors of the regime they were born into - as we are informed they were “fashioned of human skin and fat” at Auschwitz: a shocking and uncomfortable statement repeated several times to us during the performance. As a legacy to that era perhaps, they speak of their subsequent owners in derogatory tones, denouncing them for being “fat, sweaty, Asian …” and tellingly “a lower race”. The stage is bare apart from a bench (enabling another dimension to the increasingly dynamic movement) with a screen at the back, conveying images that hark back to the era; coupled with rousing music and scratchy sound effects - reminding us of a badly tuned radio - that help create mood and break the action at specified points. Light coloured clothing hangs in front of the screen which gives the piece another interesting visual aspect. Are these the clothes of Auschwitz victims perhaps - or simply other contents of the human ‘wardrobe’ - who might have similar stories?
‘Right Left With Heels’ is a powerful, highly original piece, directed with precision by Rasa Niurkaite. The cyclical element brings to mind the well-known Absurdist writer Ionesco and his wonderfully nonsensical ‘The Bald Prima Donna’. There is a feeling however, that rather than repeat the same stories, perhaps a more linear approach to exploring further owners would enable the piece to develop and expand further. And yet this is Absurdism and by no means a Naturalistic experience.
As an audience we are challenged on a number of levels, although I couldn’t help feeling that the undeniable energy of this piece being performed live was lost in this recording - although it was filmed brilliantly in a tight space of 48 hours. As Niurkaite says “not being live misses a lot of the audience interaction.” I think this however, is a piece that has a lot to be gained from a repeated viewing which I will do on playback - and who knows, hopefully as a live performance in the future.
Reviewer - Georgina Elliott
on - 13/11/20
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