You have to appreciate a company that leaves sweets on seats of the audience, like pillow chocolates at a hotel, but, sadly, they did not sweeten this show for me. Interruption is billed as a mixture of naturalism and physical theatre, two genres that very rarely go hand in hand. Unfortunately for Interruption, these two methods of performance barely held hands, let alone gelled into a perfect union.
The piece was a well-performed series of exercises and drama games that hadn’t quite developed enough to stand on their own yet. Some of the scenes and techniques were overused via repetition. For the audience, simply removing a dead character doesn’t change a scene enough to make it worth a reprise. Some of the more spectacular elements, paired lifts and the use of strobe lights for example, felt unnecessary and decorative. The scene of the characters’ first day at school finally starts to show the signs of a naturalism that works. It’s funny because it is honest. But this moment is short lived and then it’s back to superfluous movement and indicative acting.
There is a scene with a scarf dancing featuring the image of scarves as pouring blood, which was well discovered and played, but the other uses of this device, such as ‘every one in the red scarf represents the same girl’ is general and not potent, and these images come too few and too late to redeem this piece.
