Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✭✩
written by Clare Beresford, Dominic Conway & Shamira Turner, directed by Alexander Scott
Little Bulb Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
April 14-24, 2010
Crocosmia is a quirky little play, both outlandishly funny and unexpectedly serious, that takes the audience on more delirious journey in its 65 minutes than do most modern plays twice that length. Created by Little Bulb Theatre of Farnham Maltings in the UK, the play won the Fringe First Award for New Writing at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Theatre Passe Muraille brings the play here for its North American premiere.
On a cluttered stage we meet the Brackenberg siblings--the 11-year-old twins Finnley (Dominic Conway) and Sophia (Shamira Turner) and their sister Freya (Clare Beresford), aged seven-and-three-quarters. Judging by their parents’ vintage vinyl record collection, whose covers they lay down to outline the stage, they live in the pre-CD era of the late 1970s or early ‘80s. This deliberate datedness gives the show the humour and poignancy of old family home movies. The Brackenbergs enact for us their daily rituals, like Freya’s gnawing a carrot into a goldfish shape and recreations of their parents’ conversations, as well as presenting shows within the show like the “Superfishy Underwater Orchestra” with its gurgling chorus and an episode of “Freya’s Knows Best” in which Freya shows us how to grow a crocosmia (a flower of the iris family) by planting a light-bulb in a box of soil. Halfway through we discover that the play itself is the means through which the children are manically channelling their feelings about a sad event in their past. This climaxes when the Brackenberg Battenberg Puppet Theatre, using Battenberg cakes, presents favourite memories from the children’s happier days.
The cast give such convincing performances as children you soon forget they’re all recent university graduates. Director Alexander Scott has given the action which, in fact, requires the utmost precision the feeling that it’s completely improvised, thus creating a balance between order and chaos, reality and fantasy, that provides both the play’s underlying structure and its theme. Crocosmia creates a wonderful portrait of the wisdom of innocence that is as moving as it is wildly imaginative. Besides, if you've never seen “cake-puppetry,” you haven't lived.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly, 2010-04-16.
Photo: Shamira Turner, Clare Beresford and Dominic Conway.
2010-04-16
Crocosmia