Accentuate the Positive

Hard though it may be to believe, some have suggested that this blog might be a little negative in tone. In fact, having read through my last few entries, I realise that statement is false: it's not hard to beleive at all. In the circumstances (not to mention the fact that, as a writer, I need to improve my karma before any critics decide to look at something I've written) I thought I should take time out from my usual carping, moaning, sneering and such like and offer up some praise. Luckily for me, I went to see Theatre de Complicite's "A Minute Too Late" at the National Theatre last weekend. It was intriguing, compelling, smartly acted, fluidly mimed(1) and elegantly directed. The cast (Jozef Houben, Simon McBurney and Marcello Magni(3)) beautifully illustrate the absurdities and embarrassments, as well as the simple humanity, of our struggles to come to terms with death. Throughout McBurney takes on the role of that great archetype the embarrassed Englishman, while Houben and Magni play everything from a chief registrar thwarted in his duties by an absent seat to his chair to the flickering flame of a gas hob, expiring in a sudden "pop" as the bereaved McBurney makes himself a lonely cup of tea. Throughout the audience's emotions are played with great skill: people almost falling off their seats one minute, as McBurney tries in vain to follow the complex rituals of a church service and ends up tying himself in knots; the next were nodding in recognition as McBurney physically shrivels at every word of his wife's prognosis. A Minute Too Late is very, very funny (eliciting genuine laughter from the audience, not the ghastly guffaws used to indicate that one has been clever enough to get the playwright's oh-so-witty joke) but that shouldn't make anyone forget that it is also very serious, really rather grown-up theatre.

(1) Ah yes, "mimed". Now I feel I should own up here and point out that mime is something that I loathe. Show me a man in a black lycra all-in-one, beret and white-painted face, pretending to be trapped in a glass box and I will show you a man who deserves to die by being forced to eat his own internal organs. Force me to sit in front of a Jacques Tati film for more than five minutes and I will try to eat my own internal organs. Complicite's work, however, falls firmly within the infinitely more respectable category of "physical theatre", with mime a means to illustrate human thought and emotion rather than an end in itself(2).
(2) In fact the least satisfying section, for me at least, of "A Minute Too Late" was a car chase in a hearse, which was almost pure mime and which, though good for several big laughs, added little or nothing by way of characterisation.
(3) who is, rather wonderfully, the voice of Pingu.