Frau Trapp’s Five Lines | Photo: Frau Trapp
By Esmee Wright
Barbican Centre,
London
There’s something a little Atwoodian about Frau Trapp’s Five Lines, the final offering from this year’s MimeLondon series at the Barbican. Its apocalyptic vision bears many of the plot beats of dystopian fiction: an ominous company taking control after an entirely unrelated natural disaster, corporate memphis adverts promising a better life, and a social caste system in a supposedly egalitarian techtopia. Love is there, but not enough. Music provides a solace, but solitary performance isn’t a cure-all. The only real solution is a return to the earth in this surprisingly hopeful eco-narrative.
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Where Five Lines really pushes the boundaries is in its form. With a voiceover booming out the narrative, Five Lines’s appearance in MimeLondon might be a surprise to those whose experience of mime is closer to Bip the Clown. There are no white gloves and face paint here. Instead, MimeLondon curators Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seeling seek to promote unusual physical theatre from around the globe.
The theatre produced by Frau Trapp is certainly unusual. Described as Micro Cinema Theatre, the events are acted out largely not by mime artists but by inch-tall cardboard cutouts mounted on board game figurine stands. The four full-sized members of the cast, led by Mina Trapp and Matteo Frau, manipulate these cutouts and the camera angles they are filmed at, creating a life-size movie on a screen ‘behind’ the action, as it were.
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The dislocation offers a where’s-wally delight in figuring out where and what and how the onscreen effects are being made, and also brings a surprising pathos to the performance. I doubt I have ever been so moved by an immobile bit of cardboard as when the camera zoomed in on larger-than-life devastation and the theatre speakers blasted out a devastated howl, all as the tragedy played out in miniscule in front. 