DramaFeaturedLondonReview

Compagnie Focus & Chaliwaté: Dimanche – MimeLondon, Peacock Theatre

Reviewer: Phoebe Taplin

Creators: Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux and Sandrine Heyraud

The accelerating climate crisis is the most serious threat facing humanity. Is it the moment for comic physical theatre on this theme? Definitely. Dimanche is simultaneously the most playful and most powerful show about the global emergency. Fractured ice, flooded cities, heatwaves and tornadoes: the audience experiences all these and more in an hour or so of mime, puppetry and beautiful stagecraft that makes you want to laugh, cry and take action.

Two highly skilled Belgian troupes, Compagnie Focus and Chaliwaté, worked together for three years to create this intricate piece of theatre. It opens with a tiny VW van, its windows and headlights glowing, driving over snowy hills. The white landscape includes a person with a tree on his head and bright-windowed houses on his shoulders. The surprisingly effective motif is repeated, reinforcing the idea of body as world/world as fragile body and ideas of scale, while the VW gets bigger. And suddenly, we’re inside the van with three documentary makers, bouncing along through the Arctic as they share a thermos, eat waffles, and listen to Paul Simon songs.

This cheerful expedition doesn’t end well. Things are perilous out there, both for the humans and for the animals they hope to film. Every scene is breath-taking. A team of makers and technicians are involved backstage. Tristan Galand’s videography, Guillaume Toussaint Fromentin’s mesmerising lighting design and Brice Cannavo’s terrifying soundscape of howling winds and groaning continents combine to make us feel the force of the environmental catastrophes. We are under the melting ice sheets, inside the storm, or stranded on an iceberg with the last of the polar bears.

The puppets, made by Waw! Studios and operated by figures in black, are so expressive it is impossible not to believe they are alive even when we can see the people moving them. Each movement is precise. The three performers Julie Tenret, Sandrine Heyraud and Sicaire Durieux, who also created the show, brilliantly mix balletic grace with clowning, clumsily skidding in moonboots or blown sideways by the wind. They are supported (sometimes literally) by three ninja puppeteers, complicatedly animating a flamingo or metamorphically shifting the surroundings.

Some scenes take place inside an ordinary house where a couple and their lifelike puppet mother/mother-in-law are attempting to carry on with life as usual even as the furniture melts and distorts like Dali’s surreal clocks. Granny tries to relax, listening to opera (Bellini’s Norma) with her feet in a tub of ice, as three electric fans whirl and blow. The contorted positions the couple have to adopt just in order to carry on eating breakfast reflect the stubbornness of humanity, trying to ignore the need for radical action. What happens to this house is extraordinary: tragedy, wit and beauty coexist in a drowned world where fish nibble at drifting slices of toast, and a useless fan floats through the blackness, trailing its flex like a jellyfish tentacle.

Dimanche hardly uses spoken words, but it says a great deal. The title refers to the family’s Sunday traditions, the restful reality the household works so hard to maintain. It could also suggest the urgency of our shared situation, still denying the reality of climate breakdown on the last day of the week.

Runs until 1 February 2025

The Reviews Hub Score

Beautiful stagecraft

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The Reviews Hub - London

The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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