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Those
Eyes That Mouth Group: Grid Iron |
| Andrew Chippindale | |
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Half way through the festival and my patience is starting to wear a little thin with The Oblique. Sure, in the normal run of things I like nothing more than to have absolutely no idea what is going on for a majority of time I'm in a theatre, but when there seems to be not one company on the Fringe prepared to tell anyone anything about what they're up to it begins to grate slightly. That said, Grid Iron are among the more successful exponents of the unclear with this odd little piece that seems to be about a woman, mostly alone in her house, with hints of spectral presences, the ghosts of her past, her retreat from the world, her break up and subsequent break down and her obsession with recreating Vermeer's painting Girl With Pearl Earring. The site-specific piece takes the form of a promenade performance gradually making its way from the entrance lobby to the top room in this one elegant house. It is an evocative setting, and one that is used to good effect by the company (although I suspect it is all the more effective if one views the latter, night time performance and not the five o'clock showing). The performance has an almost David Lynch-like quality of neo-gothic strangeness with unclear voices audible in hallways outside whichever room the audience finds itself, menacing music giving way to haunting ballads sung live and the expression of fear that frequently passes across the face of the woman. As the piece progresses, there is a sense that this lurking menace diminishes somewhat and that some sort of resolution has been hinted at by the close, but with no narrative, only fragments with so little to link them, this could be my imagination. 2
August to 25 August
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