Saturday 25 February 2012

"theatre for the enquiring mind"

Half way...four weeks into the tour. We're having a good time, and enjoying the different feel and atmosphere the show gets in different spaces.

Audience response has been great, and there are some very nice reviews out there. So, if you're interested - and with the inevitable SPOILER ALERTS - you can read the What's On Stage review from Soho Theatre here:
This is no mere travelling show of oddities, a simple freak show of human weirdness, but a true spoken museum.
and the Public Reviews piece from The Junction, Cambridge, here: 
Dani Abulhawa has started a new Live Art blog, and her response to the show is the first entry on it, which is great:
[it is] constructed in such a way that the stories flowed in waves of emotion and energy.
And here's the review from the Northern Echo, reproduced with their permission, as it isn't on their website:
Northern Stage, Newcastle - Third Angel & mala voadora
What I Heard About The World
Review by Helen Brown

Third Angel is an international, experimental performance company producing theatre, film and video, while mala voadora, which incidentally means ‘flying suitcase’, is a Portuguese company who explore social issues and the nature of theatrical spectacle.  Quite an unlikely marriage, but its offspring production is something quite unique and brutally entertaining.  

Arriving in the auditorium, we find three men, Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly and Chris Thorpe, already on stage in a kind of live photograph of a dwelling that could be anywhere on earth. Their stories come from all corners of the globe and although some must be made-up, all are streaked with an uncomfortable reality, like the woman in Antarctica who cut the cancer from her own breast with the aid of a surgeon on the internet; a silent radio broadcast in Israel and a donkey painted to look like a zebra in a Zoo in the Gaza Strip. We are invited to consider global warming with the aid of salt poured into water and we meet Flat Brian, the cardboard replacement dad.

The structure of this performance is hands-on and punctuated with Thorpe’s excellent guitar solos.  Pictures are drawn, a great deal of Jameson’s whiskey is consumed and by the end of the show the stage is littered with confetti, paint, water and laughter.  All three performers are impressive; in particular Andrade, who breaths believable life into every move he makes. 

This is theatre for the enquiring mind; a journey through other cultures to find strange and wondrous stories that leave your jaw dropped and your mouth open. 

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