I’ve spent most of the last week at the Barbican, soaking up the outlandish beauty of the London International Mime Festival, full of all the whimsical wit and downright absurdity that this year’s productions have to offer. From vaudevillian puppet shows to borderline existential horror, I loved every minute. With still a few performances left before the festival wraps up, here’s my pick of the best so far, and what’s to come!

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop: Famous Puppet Death Scenes

I actually have a rather obscure knowledge of puppet theatre, having written several essays on the works of Jan Švankmajer, Jiří Trnka and other Eastern European greats in my recherché youth. It doesn’t often come in handy I’ll grant you, but it did allow me a finer appreciation of this brilliant piece by Canadian Puppet Masters, Old Trout Puppet Workshop. The pastiched vignettes were eccentrically performed, under the supposed directorship of elderly puppet, Nathaniel Tweak, whose own solo performance The Last Heartbeat of Nathaniel Tweak provides a real anguished sadness to an otherwise darkly comical production. 

One of the best skits comes in the form of a macabre Punch and Judy-esque piece that endures throughout the show until building to a climactic crescendo of violence and death (common themes in the work as a whole). The Feverish Heart by Nordo Frot, in which an increasingly panicked performer is unable to escape his Sisyphean fate of a satisfying wallop to the head. Overall, a solid 9/10 for me: A perfect mirror held to the banality of life, albeit with a little too many screaming butterflies.

Flesh

The UK debut of Belgium group Still Life, proved an insightful, at times horrifying, look into the unseen world of pent up emotion and the Freudian ‘id’. It reminded me a little of Ibsen, if all the raw emotion in the build-up of Hedda Gabler had fully, brutally exploded off of the page. This wordless, darkly comical performance was split into four short acts, each with its own poignancy and noiseless eruption of bitter futility in what philosopher Slavoj Žižek would surely have recognised as the old one-two punch: the jab of tragedy, followed swiftly by the right hook of farce.

Whilst the overall effect of the piece was sublime, some of the individual acts did feel as though they dragged a little, with mundanity seeping through at times, although to be fair this only enhanced the comedic futility of the work. The highlight of the piece was an almost scene-for-scene reenactment of Titanic in VR (complete with steamy handprint and floor-humping). Never missing a beat, this scene was held taut by an excellent performance from Muriel Legrand, no easy feat whilst fitted with a VR headset.

The Unknown (Dir Tod Browning)

Wrapping up my week, I attended a screening of the 1927 silent film The Unknown, starring the famously versatile Lon Chaney, whom film buffs may recognise as the titular ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’ played by James Cagney in the 1957 drama based upon Chaney’s life.

Chaney plays Alonzo, a seemingly armless amputee hiding a secret of, well..he has arms. The premise of the film is overall highly comical (despite being intended as ‘horror’), with Alonzo (who it transpires is a killer on the run from the police), falling for the ringmaster’s daughter, the smokily beautiful Nanon (played by a young Joan Crawford). 

Also, he has two thumbs, not really relevant, just mildly distracting.

After wooing Nanon enough to solidify her existing hatred/fear of ‘men’s arms’, he eggs on his romantic rival, the circus strongman to pursue her, knowing she’ll fear him (and his ‘men’s arms’). There is a problem with Alonzo’s plan though, he still has his manly arms, hidden as they are underneath a tightly-wound corset. Still, nothing blackmailing a doctor can’t fix as he goes off to remove his arms, returning to find that, ironically, and oh so comedically, Nanon has fallen for her strongman, despite his arms. The denouement involves two horses almost pulling off more arms and Alonzo eventually getting his just deserts - a few horse hooves to the chest, the side effect of which is a swift death (if only he still had arms to protect himself!). 

The film was perfectly scored with a live accompaniment from musicians Stephen Horne, on piano, and Martin Pyne, on drums, who create a haunting and evocative score that adds to the depth and emotion of the piece.

Read the Run Riot Interview with LIMF co-Directors, Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan, here.