Creator and Director: Matthew Lenton
Of all the shows at this year’s London International Mime Festival, Vanishing Point’s Interiors corresponds most closely to what we think of as traditional mime. Behind glass windows we watch seven people at a dinner party eating, drinking and dancing. With only the barest spoken narrative, their meal is fraught with emotions that we recognise too easily.
Sergio and his granddaughter Lola entertain guests on the Winter Solstice to celebrate the passing of the shortest day and, symbolically, their survival. Their cabin in the snow is Kai Fischer’s handsome set that would be quite at home on the stage of a Robert Lepage show, one side full of windows through which we watch their ritual. Interiors is set in a recent past before mobile phones and where people still know the words to Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat. But the location is not so familiar. The dinner guests bring guns with them to protect against a polar bear attack. The bears are hungry in the dead of winter. It’s also a country where olive trees thrive in the summer.
But despite Vanishing Point’s hard work in setting time and place, they don’t really matter as the jealousies, hopes and frustrations of the characters are common everywhere. Dorothy is loud, brash and a little pretentious. We can surmise all this just by the way actor mouths her words or pushes down her dress. Christian suddenly realises that he doesn’t really love Lola after she tells an inappropriately dirty joke. Paul is infatuated with his new girlfriend Aurora while Bolla is just there for the food. The actors effortlessly bring these ordinary people to life. But this comes at a cost as their very ordinariness threatens to drain the drama from the stage.
Outside the house a ghost watches the dinner party like the Little Match Girl. She occasionally tells the audience what the characters are thinking, but Interiors works best when the actors perform in silence. There’s real comedy in watching Christian not being able to work out the drinking game that they play during the meal, and there’s a great moment of schadenfreude-by-proxy as we watch them roar with laughter at the disappointment of one character who has gone into the kitchen.
Conceived by Matthew Lenton, Interiors is a clever way to reflect our need for company and society, but it is also cold and distancing. You wish that Sergio would throw open the windows and flood the Barbican with warmth and noise.
Runs until 5 February 2022
