Showing between Monday 11th and Wednesday 13th May 2009 @ Bristol Old Vic
Showing as part of Mayfest 2009, Bristol’s festival of contemporary theatre

Harry Kellerman is a disturbed mathematician going insane in hospital. This fractured plot takes a backseat though and Imitating The Dog’s latest production is really just about the unique, highly technical visuals they create onstage, combining live action and video projection. What’s immediately impressive is how they’ve thrown themselves completely into the technique with layer upon layer of continuous projection throughout the show. There’s often so much going on onstage at once it’s difficult to keep up! It’s a brave attempt at pushing cinematic theatre forward but it sadly doesn’t come off.

The biggest limitation of the technique and one of Kellerman’s major downfalls is that because everything is video streamed and all the dialogue pre-recorded, any actors onstage are just miming and as an audience member, you feel completely emotionally detached from anything going on. The videos mean there’s no room for actors’ interpretation or adaptation and therefore no space for their characters or the performance itself to breathe and grow. You end up questioning the need for the actors to be there at all if all they are going to do is mimic the action that’s being projected behind them. Matters weren’t helped by the fact you could never see the actors properly either, hidden as they were behind a projection screen that filled the entire stage minus two thin viewing windows. Actors were often cut off below the knee and above the neck so all you did see was a lot of backs and bums.

The actors bend over backwards to accommodate the video techniques and it made it increasingly difficult to engage with the show. Perhaps if they projected the action live or at least had some of the dialogue spoken live then I might have got a bit more emotionally invested but as it was, I just didn’t care about anyone or anything happening onstage and the constant fidgeting and glow of people checking their phones and watches around me showed I wasn’t alone.

It’s clear that the plot took a backseat at an early stage in the production process and thus the story was very weak, full of laughable clichés and pretentious mystery. In between Olof Mellberg running around in baggy, dirty pyjamas and a grating sub-plot about a pregnant Cockney maid (“Crikey Gov’na!”), there were several tedious scenes like a bicycle chase sequence and a plane flying over a city that were meant to be visually exciting but offered absolutely nothing else.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. Occasionally, when it was clear that the space and how to get the most out of the video-action combo had been thought about creatively, some individual scenes worked really well. Things suddenly became a lot more interesting too when the live action went against what was happening onscreen and rather than mimicking, the actors embodied a different emotional perspective.

Love it or hate it though, at least Kellerman is stirring debate and that’s half the point isn’t it?

www.imitatingthedog.co.uk

www.mayfestbristol.co.uk

Matt Whittle