Writer: Miranda Prag
On a stage festooned with random piles of copper tubing and bicycle wheels, Miranda Prag stands and lectures (in a fun way) her audience on the Tyranny of Time, and the steps she took to escape it. She is very self-deprecating, very droll, extremely in tune with her own surtitles, and interesting.
Resisting time involves living on a canal in a narrow boat (with ducks and moorhens as the principal markers of moments) which leads to learning how to rebuild diesel engines. Somewhere in there, she gets the urge to travel as far north as there are isles in Britain, winding up on Unst. It all makes a sort of sense in the theatre.
For the second half of her hour-and-a-bit onstage, Miranda doesn’t talk much, and the story is told by her own voice-over (excellent sound design by Alice Gilmour)). Miranda is busy re-fashioning her collection of tubes and wheels into Heath Robinson-y assemblies, abstract statuary decorated with discs and stars, that become increasingly purposeful as the show progresses, until she makes stage magic happen before your very eyes. It’s a very satisfying conclusion to a very entertaining disquisition.
The show is almost entirely the work of Miranda Prag, though she had some help from Tom Mills in designing the copper sculptures. Everything is undercut with a modesty and a sense of irony, but some genuinely interesting ideas are explored, and some very un-solemn but nonetheless serious points about extinction and the climate crisis land well. She diminishes her own significance, but she doesn’t necessarily diminish the ideas.
It’s a quirky show, it’s a low-key show, it features dance sequences by the Queen of the Flies that probably wouldn’t make it onto the stage at Sadler’s Wells, but it is never dull, often surprising, and fundamentally thought-provoking. Many longer, better-funded, higher-profile shows say a lot less and have way less charm.
Runs until 6 December 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Quietly Quirkily Quizzical
