As part of the London International Mime Festival this simple, precise performance fits perfectly as both an evocation of classic mime, in its familiar gestures, and the new, exciting and innovative movement that makes up the modern festival. Directed by Man Drake founder Tomeo Vergés, the piece, silent bar the opening monologue, takes the recognisable movements of the everyday and reverses, twists and morphs them into some strange thing, engaging and fresh.
Performed at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, it concerns a post-war ménage á trois in the company’s native France. Returning from the front, a presumed missing soldier arrives home to find his wife living with another man. The story is supposedly true, the Vergés family tale of his grandmother and her first husband, the returning soldier, at the end of World War II. It is this story that is told in the opening monologue, spoken in the voice of the director by a female performer. Making her exit, this first performer, the only one to speak and never seen again, leaves an empty white room, soon filled by three performers inhabiting the roles of the lovers and solider.
These three performers judder through the piece like a paused VHS, the constituent movements involved in reading a paper or removing a jacket repeated again and again to the static soundtrack. The length of the piece is ticked away by the clock displayed prominently on the wall of the set, almost as a challenge to the constant rewinding of time that occurs throughout the piece. With such simple actions constantly repeated back and forth, the story is boiled down to its simplest elements. A man and a woman sit and a second man enters, sparking off a series of tight dialogues between the bodies of the three.
There is humour here, with the audience laughing at the absurdity of the repeated and reversed look of shock on the performers’ faces. With such small and understated characterisation there are perhaps unavoidably moments when a performer’s eyes wander or when slight imperfections infiltrate the repetition, but the commitment to the score of movement is for the most part compelling.
Two points – when the back and forth of the rewind is broken by europop, a small disco interlude in which the performers switch movement style to a lithe boogie – highlight more than anything how unnatural is their robotic action in the rest of the piece. The change between the two is startling. The female performer, standing in for Vergés’ grandmother, is particularly precise in her movement and absolute in her focus, her red dress one of the only splashes of colour to stand out against the drab grey and white. Really the piece belongs to her, although the final act, when she leaves and the two men confront each other, pushing their bodies together, is also memorable.
Vergés is sure to highlight his medical training in the program and the opening speech, paired with the information that his father was a butcher. Bodies and flesh link the two roles, and Vergés, in his work as a choreographer and director, shows the same forensic attention to the details of a moving body as a good doctor might. The achievement of the performance might be, however, the infusion of personality to these clockwork bodies and their peculiar movement. Well designed and lit beautifully, the piece counterpoints its inherent strangeness with wit and self-awareness. Anatomia Publica is hard to explain but easy to describe, a piece that should be experienced rather than read about.