Extravaganza Macabre (Battersea Arts Centre, 30 August)

Dear Battersea Arts Centre: your "outdoor performance space" is basically an air vent. Nevertheless: this was a strong performance by a great, young, three-person company--all three people reading this blog should seek out Little Spark, immediatley, as I feel they are going to do great things. By the end of the evening they completely owned the air vent. 

Victorian melodrama comes to none of us first-hand, yet we're all aware of its trappings through nine-hand borrowings of people who, at some point, must have seen it. (I'm finishing a book on Victorian theatre, suggesting Snidely Whiplash as one of hte most influential figures of my childhood.) This piece played with the genres conventions, taking them seriously to about a 2/3 panto scale--we were encouraged to laugh, and never genuinely felt scared, but the piece somehow worked, amidst amnesia, an evil lord, demons, and whatnot. They audience was encouraged to participate, passing knives (for example) back and forth to simulate stage effects. This reflected the performance's reaching into our collective memory--again, for none of us first-hand--of what "Victorian London" was like.