✭✭✭✭✭

by Andy Massingham, directed by Brian Quirt

Nightswimming, Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People, Toronto

April 8-20, 2008

Rough House is a show to lighten your mood and brighten your day.  It is a wordless 50-minute exercise in game-playing between mime Andy Massingham, who won a Dora for his performance in 2005, and lighting designers Rebecca Picherack and Michelle Ramsay.  The show is in Toronto on a cross-Canada tour.  If you’ve missed it before, see it now. 

The set with its translucent paper walls becomes a place of transformation where the laws of physics seem to be randomly applied and rescinded.  After first appearing as a shadow on the back wall, Massingham enters looking like a totally ordinary bloke in trousers, untucked shirt and comfy shoes, immediately dispelling any notion of mimes as white-gloved, white-faced creatures trapped in glass boxes.  The world he enters has only three props--a bare hanging light bulb, a small plastic bowl and a metal chair.  With the earnest expression of a child at play, Massingham attempts to discover through trial and error what rules govern this world only to find that these rules are in constant flux.  The light bulb that once responded to him soon has a mind of its own.  The chair he could once move easily is soon stuck to the floor and impossibly heavy or then moves about on its own.  The bowl he was just holding soon moves about the floor becomes a myriad of objects changing instant by instant with the merest flick of a hand.  Shadows sometimes have substance, sometimes not.  The bright squares of light that appear on the stage sometimes confine Massingham like force fields, sometimes become islands in a dangerous sea of darkness.  In one amazing sequence a circle of light appears and Massingham clutches at the bowl for dear life for fear of sliding off a sphere into the abyss. 

This is physical theatre at its finest using the very simplest means to achieve one brilliant effect after another.  From silent movie-like pratfalls to metaphysical humour, this is a show for anyone who knows how to laugh and still has a sense of wonder.          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-04-11.

Photo: Andy Massingham. ©John Lauener.