Such is the enormity of the problems facing humanity at the start of the 21st century, it is hard to get a perspective on them. How can we comprehend overwhelmingly large events such as the melting of the ice caps at the same time as trying to do something about it? Can the shifting perspectives of puppetry and an object-theatre world, where vast landscapes are rendered in miniature and street-level problems are viewed from above, allow us to think afresh about questions that otherwise seem too close for comfort?
Two shows in Edinburgh attempt to come up with an answer. Running in the international festival, Dimanche (★★★☆☆) is a collaboration between Focus and Chaliwaté, two Belgian puppetry and physical theatre companies, and uses a jokey cartoon-like format to take us on a global tour of environmental disasters. In their roles as a wildlife documentary crew, the performers Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud (who also write and direct) come to an unfortunate end as the ice cracks, the waters rise and the storms brew.
As a piece of stagecraft, Dimanche is formidably done. It is not only the variety of techniques, ranging from the manipulation of miniature figures to mime and large-scale puppetry (cute polar bear alert). It is also the astonishing speed with which one scene dissolves into the next: a domestic interior complete with operating chairlift takes the place of an Arctic landscape in an instant.
One minute, the undulations of a human body will form the hills and valleys over which toy cars will crawl. The next, a full-size canoe will paddle across rising waters or a performer will dangle precariously from a helicopter’s rope ladder. The inventiveness is constant, be it a house appearing on the underside of an actor’s foot or a playful routine involving an attempt to light a cigarette in a vehicle negotiating uneven terrain. As the heat rises and the fans spin, so the very furniture starts to melt.
With its combination of slow-paced visual comedy and images of tsunamis, typhoons and devastated landscapes, it is like an apocalyptic Jacques Tati. And in that sense, Dimanche sits uneasily within the world it is describing. Should we be delighted by the pulsating hands caught in a sidelight like a shoal of fish or should we be alarmed by a vision of a flooded city? Are environmental catastrophes merely material for a set of clever skits, just something else to laugh about?
At the same time, a little humour would not have gone amiss in Concerned Others (★★★☆☆), a similarly inventive if rather smaller-scale show by Edinburgh’s Tortoise in a Nutshell. Devised and performed by Alex Bird, it is about the social impact of drug and alcohol addiction, with particular focus on Scotland, which has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe.
To a soundtrack of interviews with health professionals and the “concerned others” who support those affected, Bird focuses his camera on the 32mm figures he positions on a bleak monochrome high street. Later, we see the shoe-box interiors they inhabit as the show makes the connection between addiction and social ills such as sexual abuse, poverty, poor housing and a lack of decent jobs. With animation and masks supplementing the camera work, it is elegantly done and politically well-intentioned, even if something of an illustrated lecture.
Dimanche is at Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 19 August. Concerned Others is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August
