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Pandora

 
Richard Beck Review by Richard Beck 4 Published: 3 Mar 2025 Coronet Theatre Ltd Show Dates: 27 Feb 2025-2 Mar 2025

If location is everything, Teatro dei Giordi at the Coronet Theatre have espoused this sentiment in their latest work, Pandora, which transforms the stage into a unisex public lavatory.

A fascinating snapshot of figures engaged in fast-paced, idiosyncratic and a eccentric behaviours.

For just over an hour, we face the soap dispenser, the mirror and wash-basins, the electric hand dryer, the urinals and closets of a focussed and spacious set by Anna Maddalena Cingi that feels very familiar. This is a universal convenience that one might find at an airport or railway station, in a shopping mall or beneath a bustling street. The last of these makes for greater credibility in terms of where the people who use the facilities might have come from, but again, that is not a vital element of this absurdist and surreal work. Placing it elsewhere simply stretches the imagination further.

The comings and goings have a feel of time-lapse photography. The air of normality that surrounds the first person to appear from out of the closet is soon shattered when he turns out to be a hygiene-obsessed germaphobe enduring a highly challenging set of circumstances made worse by his own clumsiness. He leaves with an unresolved situation but the production is neatly rounded off with his return in the closing sequence and the matter is resolved.

He is a gentle, comic introduction to the more extreme behaviours that follow as we begin to realise that even in this place there are conventions we generally conform to that are being challenged. While someone vomiting or an approach to engage in homosexual activity might not be uncommon, it’s not every day a pop-up choir of naked men perform in such a place. Meanwhile, we run the gamut of responses: amusement, shock, horror, surprise and revulsion come and go amid the moto perpetuo of vignettes.

An accomplished cast of Claudia Caldarano, Cecilia Campani, Giovani Longhin, Andrea Panigatti, Sandro Pivotti and Matteo Vitanza play over 50 parts. The collaborative methodology of the company means that they were also intimately involved in the creation of the piece, developing director Riccardo Pippa’s concept through hours of ideation, experimentation, improvisation and refinement. The result is not a tightly structured play with defined characters but rather a fascinating snapshot of figures engaged in fast-paced, idiosyncratic and eccentric behaviours.

If the real world is their stage then this space is their dressing room where they prepare for life’s challenges, let off steam and give vent to their emotions. Perhaps this is a place of hope where they find the resolve to face the challenges and difficulties of life brought about by opening Pandora’s box, or maybe it's just a day in the life of a public convenience.

Amir Nisi

Richard Beck

A graduate in theology and education, Richard acted and contributed to dance, drama and music productions throughout his teaching career. He joined Broadway Baby in 2014 and is now our Editor-in-Chief. He usually disappears to warmer climes for the winter to pursue his passion for travel.

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The Blurb:

Last time Italian physical theatre company Teatro dei Giordi came to The Coronet with Sulla Morte Senza Esagerare it was one of the fastest selling shows of the season. This time they bring an extraordinary show about… a public toilet.

Funny, fast paced, at times wildly surreal and at others surprisingly familiar, six actors play over fifty identities in an astonishing feat of physical and visual transformation. 

All sorts of people pass through it. It is a toilet at the end of a corridor or under a city square. It could be in an airport, a club or a service station.

It is an awkward place of passage, of waiting, of meeting unlikely strangers, an improvised dressing room where one can transform, connect, hide, or let off steam.  In a pit-stop from their ‘real’ lives, people experience the whole spectrum of emotion, from rage and vulnerability, to joy and hilarity. 

But even in a public toilet, there are conventions of behaviour.  How do we feel if they are broken?

Teatro Dei Gordi’s theatrical ‘family’ has worked together for over a decade, with their language rooted in the Italian tradition of mask theatre. Their work has developed to explore everyday masks, like a pair of glasses, an expression, the clothes we wear and the postures we all use. In a public toilet, everyone is anonymous. Everyone is wearing a mask.

Founded in 2010, the common thread of the Teatro dei Gordi’s path to date is the search for a specifically theatrical language, made of movement, scores of concrete gestures, objects, clothes, masks, music, poetry, presence and encounter.

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