Writer and Director: TAKDAJA
The VAULT Festival is the place to experiment and TAKDAJA have certainly grasped the opportunity to explore the surreal and bizarre in their imaginative if unstructured 55-minute piece Fruits or the Decline of a Distant Memory. A combination of unrelated sketches and philosophical musings, this odd production feels a bit like it’s a personified fruit fly character; sweet and lost, searching for meaning but eventually you just want to shoo it away.
The scenario is a spatial hinterland between worlds in which characters are exploring notions of self and identity. Staged in traverse in the long Cavern space at the VAULT Festival, individuals appear in turn at opposite ends of the room, delivering their monologue before fading into the darkness once more. None of them actively reference their surroundings, and it might help if they did as there’s little sense of the location or if they are all in a single or multiple worlds.
The mini stories also develop quite a range from a Polish actress pretending to be a cleaner and then actually being a cleaner, a young man obsessing over a relationship that may have ended and describing a sexual encounter on a beach, an Eve figure who tosses away half eaten apples and bashes a rubber snake against the floor, as well as two children playing clapping games and then hide and seek as the audience take their seats.
There are snatches of purpose in Fruits or the Decline of a Distant Memory as characters muse on notions of destiny and free will as well as the performative nature of gender, removing one set of clothes and silently adopting another but none of these ideas come together to form clear reflections or messages to be conveyed. Is TAKDAJA’s show about the distorted perception of individuals at the centre of their own worlds – typified by the singer who chases the spotlight – or about making sweeping statements about social control and the expectations imposed on us all? Perhaps both, maybe neither.
Either way, there is a lot of fruit as the title promises, much of which is squished and smashed into the floor. Eve discards her apples, a character smashes a watermelon only for the fruit fly in a later scene to gnaw at it, while a priest-like figure talks of the fruit of good and bad trees before crushing a mouldy banana in their hands. Either way the creatures of the VAULT after dark will enjoy the feast.
Performed by Mimmi Bauer, Pat Dynowska and Michał Szpak, dreamlike shows are hard to manage and this one doesn’t quite have enough structure to make the situation and its characters either credible or amusing enough to sustain the running time. Surreal ideas can only take you so far, ultimately shows need to have something coherent to say as well.
Runs until 5 March 2023
