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The
Last Night of Mankind Group: El Periferico de Objetos |
| Andrew Chippindale | |
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What fun they must have in the offices of The International Festival. Imagine the scene, with Festival Director on the phone: 'Hello? Yes? A Portuguese/Argentinean Company with a version of a fifteen-hour Austrian play written in 1917 by a satirist who was notorious for his misanthropy and gloomy view of the human race? They can do it in two hours? And they're just naked and covered in mud? Great! Tell me more...' In my limited experience, there seem to be two main sorts of plays on the international festival circuit. There are the very visceral, clowny, messy ones, usually involving copious quantities of movement, mud, and nudity, and there are the almost too clinical, minimal, Teutonic, serious ones. Last Night of Mankind manages to combine the two; or at least to do both things, one each side of the interval. In the first half the five strong company, augmented by some dwarfish puppets, slide around naked and mud-covered on set consisting of more mud while fighting, playing accordion and dancing. Snippets of text from Krauss's original are screamed in Portuguese (surtitles provided). All very satisfyingly arty, even if the effect is something like an unusually nihilistic episode of Teletubbies. The second half, by contrast, is set in a stark white cubicle of a room from a Manic Street Preachers video where a malign, unseen Stephen Hawking orders five housemates around Big Brother style. This second half restates the message of the first half, that civilisation is only a thin veneer twixt us and a state of savagery. The housemates variously break down, beat one another up, go mad, break down, gas some real cockroaches, and then one dresses up as a polar bear while another sits in a fridge attaching clothes pegs to his face. Again, it's arty and it gets it point across, if in a slightly less fun way than the first half. Ultimately the overall experience is more baffling than enlightening, though. 11
August to 13 August
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