Битеф
Sidewalk Edge/Shaw The tenth London International Mime Festival has opened at the Shaw Theatre in Euston Road with a shifting and elusive study in false relationships and illusory perspectives as hard to pin down as a drawing by Escher. The Dutch company Studio Hinderick plays the hour-long arabesque of obsession and frustration, cross-purposes and growing apart, on a sloping white-sheeted platform that tilts to become first a giant bed, revealing stout columnar wooden legs through gashes in which human arms beckon and faces pear (the Lowlands were the home of Bosch as well). The sheet is eventually sucked into a hole and we see that the platform is a pavement, its flagstones dwindling towards us. This ambiguity characterises the whole performance; are they approaching or departing? Climbing or descending? A voice-over reads the letters written by the main character to his friend Gerard. These concern the thwarted affection between himself and David, a young blond boy whom we have seen in flickering film at the play’s opening, swimming, fishing, bicycling. The writer recalls their games, notably a mock-wedding which we finally see enacted, David in a wedding-dress carried over a make-believe threshold. The tortuous relationship smacks faintly of Lolita. The narrator agonises over the nature of love, quoting St Paul to the Corinthians as he savagely whirls watering-cans of increasing size over the paving-stones. A puddle-shaped mirror is revealed as the glass through which we see darkly (here in a mirror dimly lacks the ring of the original); and most of the action consists of the protagonist’s attempt to become a man and put away childish things. The bland beautiful David whom we see naked but for a vest gazes fixedly, unchanging; an ideal congealed into obsession. Another naked young man throws a rope down the steep ramp to our narrator, a life-line which the older man is reluctant to take - representing maturity? Reality? The adult self? No author is credited though Hinderick de Groot’s artistic direction obviously dominates the comapny’s work. What is certain, however, is that the set is a real star. The stage