Theatre

Strings Attached: The Birdman, Monkey Biz, and Happy Everyday!

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 1 June, 2010 21:26

Three monkeys sit in the dark, mouth, ears and eyes covered, quivering in terror as smoke seeps from the earth and out crawls the bones of a long dead chimpanzee. The three year old perched in a ball on her father’s lap looks over at me. Our mutual glance says it all: Nothing good can come from a dead monkey! Then the corpse starts dancing a funky jig, yeah man! flinging its bones around and having them snap back on the beat. The kid is dancing along on her poor pop’s crotch, ending possible future siblings, because she knows now that a dead monkey’s okay if it can still rock out.

Entering the Puppet Barge, currently moored at Little Venice, is like descending into a gypsy’s submarine. Deep, African red walls of ribbed and riveted metal are hung with dozens of traditional marionettes from around the world. As the lights fill the tiny stage the barge seems to double in size, like Dr. Who’s box as decorated by Terry Gilliam.

The Birdman is a visual poem about a baby bird left behind in the nest. The chick tumbles to the ground where it’s found by a lonely old man. Pointing at the sky, apparently giving directions where best to go when you have wings, the old man encourages the chick to fly. Beautiful and gentle, even if the music is a little monotonous in its lyricism.

Everybody piles out of the barge for biscuits and shooters of apple juice, then scrambles back in for the second act.

Things get pumping with Monkey Biz. No plot here—none needed or wanted. Just bring on the monkeys! Watching these marionettes ride unicycles, work the trapeze, scatter their bones and reassemble themselves you realise how difficult it must be. All those strings must be choreographed to avoid turning into tumbleweeds, and the puppeteers brilliantly show their characters struggling with gravity, thus giving them the living power to carry their own weight. When the ape on the flying trapeze starts spinning frenziedly between two gibbons alternating juggling balls between their fingers and toes the show moves into the realm of magic.

**

Annette returns from a working trip with wonderful news for her husband, Fred. She’s fallen in love! What’s more, her true love, with whom she has such “mental compatibility”, the hairy-chested water connoisseur Manfred is coming to live with them! Fred’s idea of excitement is going to sleep for the thrill of eventually waking up, so he has trouble appreciating what a great deal this is for his wife. Their sweet neighbour Anna has subjugated an eleven-year desire to jump Fred into the endless baking of cakes, but he’s too decent and dull to have ever noticed. When Manfred appears, a manic creature stitched together from equal parts Basil Fawlty and Manuel and shellacked with Dapper Dan hair pomade, Fred goes along with it because he truly wants his wife to be happy.

Happy Everyday! is the second production by StageSpell Theatre of the work of Estonian playwright Jaan Täate. There are similarities to the shows at Puppet Barge, in that plot is fairly minimal and the characters move in a dream with the same whirling, inhuman energy. They are cartoons, discovering human emotions for the first time. If Manfred’s limbs were to suddenly fly off it wouldn’t be a surprise. This is essentially a middle class, drawing-room drama stretched to the absurd and plot take a long time to occur in order to fit in more snazzy, hilarious lines. However, the strengths of Happy Everyday! become weaknesses. David Swain playing Manfred is so relentlessly ecstatic I was charmed even as I wanted to throttle his neck just to calm him down. The energy and pacing of the play is also relentless, lasting over two hours with little modulation. In the second half rather mundane human motivations pop up to explain the madness of the first, turning these wonderful, jangling puppets into merely false people. At one point you can almost see the strings tangle into a clump.

Happy Everyday! bulges with enormously fun moments, more than enough to justify seeing it, but deflates at the end with exhaustion and reality. Maybe I just needed a shot of apple juice.

THE BIRDMAN/MONKEY BIZ
Until 11 July 2010
Puppet Barge | The Pool, Little Venice W9 2PF

HAPPY EVERYDAY!
Until 12 June 2010
Giant Olive Theatre at Lion & Unicorn
42-44 Gaisford St, Kentish Town, NW5 2E

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