‘So Long, Marianne’, a tribute to Marianne Faithfull is not only about the 1960s peaceniks or the proliferation of drug-users of the 1970s, it’s a piece threaded through with Shakespeare to make you weep, taking the voice of an angel to the depths of the demonic, with cigarettes and time.
Their limbs work like entities with autonomous opinions, and their muscles seem filled with mercury, yet the flow of dance is tight, from the core, and performed in satisfying unison. It’s dance that gives everything from Amapiano to House and beyond, gestural apostrophe and wit in all the right places.
In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, written by Oscar Wilde in 1899, it is the fresh directness of the set, and the articulate and unequivocal performances of the cast – in their bustles, snakeskin suits and all – that make it sing with a mix of cynicism, middle-finger-to-society chutzpah and sheer joy.
The production is delightful. It offers the now-57-year-old musical levity. As it opens, the lighting is rich with nuance. It feels like you’re gazing at a tableau of Rembrandt’s 1635 Belshazzar’s Feast not only for its colouration, but also in the evoked debauchery, teetering on the edge of biblical taboo.
‘The Moon Looks Beautiful From Here’ is Aldo Bincat’s beautiful and universal piece, written in simple language with a deft hand and clearly over a great many years of emotions spent and ideas thought and revisited, sometimes in great pain. It’s a touchstone work and a clear victory in storytelling.
‘The Tramp’ is punted as a pocket musical; it contains an immense ambit which peers into the complex life of a man who skirted controversy wherever he went. It holds you with beautiful performances and a set that strips the Chaplin name of cliche and gives analogue the upper hand.
With an energy that evokes Jenna Ortega, the performer who took on Wednesday Addams and turned her from a cameo into a series, and an ownership of a beautiful text evocative of the presence Cara Roberts casts over The King of Broken Things, Crafford-Lazarus becomes Olivia, the girl in question.
Replete with cruelty, nakedness, burning incense and song that will reach into the very chambers of your heart, ‘The Black Circus and the Republic of Bantu’ is much more of a ritual than a spectacle. You emerge from the experience with a seismic sense in your gut. Something has happened.
Malo is a tale about a clown with heart, a ringmaster with a whip and a moon with a maiden in it. It’s about love – love gained, love lost and love gossiped about on a celestial journey peppered with strong-man tactics, fire eating, Honeymanesque puns and lots of aerial dancing.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
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