Genuine Magic, Macabre included: ‘Murmurs’.

 

Strolling along Southbank, the magic of Christmas feels somewhat dampened by the obligatory sparkled tat on offer in the faux Germanic market and the sad fact that my friend and I cannot quite justify £5 for a minute serving of mulled wine. The lights of Westminster reflected on the dark Thames and our frosty breath sells wintery wonder more than squealing children, and tourists touting bags full of their newly acquired festive crap. Lucky then, that the show we are about to go and see is just the ticket to banish depressingly commercial and lack lustre pre-packaged Christmas cheer in favour of haunting bleak mid winter magic. Scrap your standard pantomime and head on down to the Southbank Centre’s mesmerising production of ‘Murmurs’, premiering in the UK and playing until the 6^th of January.

Created by director and designer Victoria Thierre Chaplin and starring her daughter Aurelia Theirre, ‘Murmurs’ is a work of dreamlike wonder, and – like all of the most powerful dreams  – is laced with a sinister sprinkling of the downright macabre. The simplistic plot of a girl on the run from the reality of her life being packed away into cardboard boxes, is soon rendered irrelevant; ‘Murmurs’ works as a feast for our eyes and imagination, traipsing through surrealist dreamscapes and circus-like set piece encounters in a mirthful mix of dance, mime, puppetry and outstanding set production, in a hallucinatory trance where plot analysis seems by the by. There is no dialogue throughout. Instead characters mumble at moments of high drama in a manner similar to plasticine stop-motion Morph’s goobledygook, and the action is driven by the pace of the musical score.  With the absence of words, the visual takes precedence as a series of sets (from cities, interiors, to the roaring ocean) converge, crumble, fade away and layer upon each other, producing the effect of a transient and shifting world where reality and illusion are inextricably tangled. The production is playfully aware of its own theatricality, exposing the ‘flatness’ of its sets at certain points, and revealing its ruses to the audience in moments such as when a tap dancer leaps off his patch of wooden stage only to be baffled by the music disobeying him and stopping short. Reminiscent of David Lynch’s audio games in ‘Mulholland Drive’ this, and other such moments of meta-theatricality, serve to tangle the web of truth and reality further still, taking us into an unpredictable vortex of visual cunning.

As I mentioned, one of the strong points of this play is its careful balance between dream and nightmare. For the most part, the tone is light hearted, as Aurelia tangos her way through costume changes and dissolving sets with a child like air of adventure and intrigue. There are moments of pure mystique and romance such as a tabletop dance in which our heroine appears to hover in midair.  However, like a Grimm fairytale, the dark danger of the imagination is never far at bay as she is pursued by a host of faceless grey cobweb-come-shadow like figures and in one scene, she appears to be raped by a puppet she controls herself. The brooding presence of a gargantuan figure with bellows for a head seems to spring from black-death era visions of death. As gently twisted, as it is charming and ethereal, ‘Murmurs’ hovers in that tender space of the imagination that loud and brash Winter Wonderland branded Christmas, tends to trample all over.