This. This. THIS is why we all keep coming back to the Fringe. Passionate, powerfully-honed talent telling the tales of our lives with humanity, empathy and a sense of powerful urgency.
Theatre like this is the reason we all keep coming back to the Fringe
Of all the many, many fabulous shows I have seen over two decades at the Fringe, only two (Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya and Action To The Word’s Clockwork Orange) have transcended the ‘merely’ excellent and lifted me to a different plain of emotional engagement and creative admiration. After watching Interbeing, I can now safely boost the list to three.
Ukraine’s 2Theatre have wrought a spell-binding physical theatre piece about the root of human conflict that is a must-see for anyone interested in representational theatre. Using photographic documentary and autobiographical testimony as their script, they create a world at once both dreamlike and tangible, ‘them’ but also ‘us’. Perhaps most worryingly of all, we want it to be ‘then’ when we really know it’s ‘now’.
Six performers move, spin, flip, sing, puppet, beatbox and play their way around the stage: at times, a six-headed monster of meaning, at others, melting into the background to propel an individual story forwards. Their discipline as team members is outstanding, and this almost telepathic connection between the cast is just one of the things that lifts this piece quite beyond the ordinary.
For me, this is theatre in its purest form – actors bereft of ego using their bodies as story-telling instruments; a simple narrative thread weaving spells of communion; and a stunning visual representation which speaks to everyone and encourages a personal interpretation beyond the original source. It is a truly haunting – but equally surprisingly joyful – piece made with such love and precision that it will stay in the mind long after leaving the performance space.
