Square Pegs, the Macready Theatre Young Actors’ Company are back again at C Arts Aquila with another joyous bag of wild imagination, comedy and physicality. 3 Couples, 2 Breakups, 1 Barbie and the Berlin Wall by Georgina Dettmer is not as bonkers as last year's production, but it has the same distinctive style that sets them apart from other companies.
Another joyous bag of wild imagination, comedy and physicality
The play is tightly directed by Tim Coker and Ellen Finlay who has choreographed some entertaining movement sequences for the eight teenagers who make up the ensemble: Millie Astbury, Chloe Beynon, Alex Bonsall, Lucia Lee, Matilda Measures, Alex Morgan, Kalil Naziu and Louisa Roberts. Together they ensure the fast-flowing pace in a show marked by rapid-fire dialogue that comes with audience participation.
They were off to a good start in creating this crazy work when they discovered the story of Eija-Riitta Eklöf who became Mrs Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer after she married the Berlin Wall. Born in 1954 in Liden, Sweden she was aged seven when the Wall went up. Watching TV one day she saw the famous edifice and it was love at first sight; a romance that became an obsession. On her sixth trip in 1979 she hired an animist who claimed to be able to communicate with the Wall. She proposed and the Wall accepted. She explained that she found “slim things with horizontal lines very sexy… The Great Wall of China’s attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier.” Little did she realise that by the age of 28 she would be a widow. But it seems that objectum-sexuality never really caught on.
It takes a lot of vivid imagination to come up with stories to beat that, but the play is full of amusing vignettes about romances around the world that include the Barbie doll affair and a German bilingual encounter, all with delightful accompaniment on the famous saxophone.
Thus the joyfully absurd meta-theatrical play about love in all its weird and wonderful forms asks many questions about what it means to be human, but true to the company’s signature style, offers absolutely no answers whatsoever in this life-imitating-art play about growing up.
