 |
Myth Understandings Golden Grove Arts Centre Thurs 9 March Theater Simple's new "silly kid show" 'Myth Understandings' is a thoroughly funny and enjoyable frolic through the texts and origins of various familiar fairy tales. Two excitable scientists are having trouble integrating the complexities of myths and fairy tales into their new automatic, personal thinking machine, the 'i-head'. While the contraption has no trouble with linear, mathematical knowledge and the like, the culturally embedded fairy tales they come into contact with seem to have a life of their own and retract at any hint of categorisation or simplification. The scientists themselves begin to experience the tales firsthand when they find that combining random physical elements of each tale causes them to automatically re-enact the respective tale. Monique Kleinhans and Andrew Litzky are terrifically lively in the two roles, prancing about the space with genuine glee and interacting with a simple, makeshift set of seemingly random objects and furniture in a very creative manner, like when they scrape the underside of an ironing board with a pen to recreate the snoring of a giant. Equally clever is the character switching, Kleinhans and Litzky simply having to alter the position of an eyebrow to change between characters as a diverse and normally visual as wolves, disaffected teenage girls, and airborne ancient Greeks. The piece also makes some very interesting references to the complicated histories of the myths included, helping, along with all else in this smart work, to prove the fairy tale a mysterious social construct with which we are less familiar than we may believe.  |
|
The latest issue available now!     |
All content copyright dB Magazine