Low Life

Blind Summit Theatre at the Norwich Puppet Theatre

Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 May 2006

Low Life

Four actor-puppeteers and puppets in a sleazy downtown bar hold sway, drawing us in to their bar stories with elegant choreography and the comedy of fringe-of-life-depression.

The alcoholic businessman, mistaking his wife for a dog, cannot bear to go home. The tiny Action Man mission-impossible plumber drowns. A wrinkled Chinese cleaner, so drawn into the book he is reading, murders it. They mix the boundaries between the manipulator and the manipulated.

And it’s all touchingly beautiful. A bar of identical ordinary little guys who parody paperback detective fiction, flow in and out of their reality.

Theses characters are puppets, yet they’re also the puppeteer/satirists, ever in sight, as one voice with their puppets. Equally, these puppets have an autonomy that is disturbing and part of the alchemy with costumes, apt music and talented performers.