Writers: Pierre Guillois, Agathe L’Huillier and Olivier Martin-Salvan
Director: Pierre Guillois
Neighbours… everybody needs good neighbours, certainly if you live in a tiny one-room studio apartment where you get to know the people through the wall a little too intimately. Compagnie le Fils du Grand Réseau bring their show BIGRE / “Fish Bowl” to the Peacock Theatre as part of MimeLondon. Filled with comic skits, individual and running gags as well as a varied emotional trajectory, this Rear Window insight into the interconnected lives of three very different but ultimately lonely, decent people certainly proves that good neighbours can become good friends.
A young woman moves into the attic flat alongside two other residents and starts to build a connection between them despite being very different from one another. As time passes, they end up embroiled in each other’s lives, cooking and socialising together, even sharing a brief, if painful romance. And as their newfound connection grows, their reliance on each other helps to allay the melancholy of their separate lives.
Much of the success of BIGRE / “Fish Bowl” is in the scenographic design by Laura Léonard, constructed by Atelier Jipanco and the Quartz, Scène nationale de Brest, which reveals three very different but small rooms in which the inhabitants of this house live and a roof space accessible by skylights, which occasionally becomes part of the drama. Within this evocative structure, the life of this building and this style of living becomes immediately vivid, creating spaces in which the opportunity for connection but also the separation and confinement of the friends is physically and metaphorically conveyed. The whole structure could do with coming forward a tad on the Peacock stage so people beyond the front row can see the detail, but it nicely evokes the familiarity of proximal living in big, overcrowded cities.
And it is the contrast between the flats and their owners that offers up plenty of scope for comedy and drama. One resident has a super minimalist space with fancy technology, including a toilet that appears with a clap – and plenty of toilet gags run through the show – while his neighbour is a messy hoarder with unsociable habits, with the young woman at the end in the Barbie pink studio. And Léonard’s work reflects the character creation developed by Guillois, L’Huillier and Martin-Salvan as performers, who flesh out the individuals just enough to make the jokes work.
There’s no single narrative as such in BIGRE / “Fish Bowl”, rather lots of captured moments including a delightful party sequence that offers up coordinated moves, slow dances and a few more toilet gags. Likewise, the few minutes on the rise and fall of the love story, leaving out the man in the middle, have emotional heft that creates a variety of moods across the piece. It does feel long at nearly 85-minutes with a bit too much repetition, and while it’s amusing and beautifully timed, it’s not often ‘laugh out loud funny’ as the promo suggests. But with House and Rohtko at the Barbican and now BIGRE / “Fish Bowl” at the Peacock, European theatre does lead the way in creating multilayered house sets on a grand scale and what it means to live so closely with strangers.
Runs until 31 January 2026
