Yahoo Movies Still Life: Flesh review – morsels of mime gesture towards a finer show
Is it too soon to see the funny side of the pandemic? A hospital death is what we are served in the first of a quartet of wordless vignettes which show the human condition in extreme states of upset being punctured by comic absurdism.
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Conceived and directed by Sophie Linsmaux and Aurelio Mergola, they are artfully performed by Still Life, a Brussels-based company making its UK debut as part of the London international mime festival. The four tales prick with expectation but end up rather too insubstantial and anticlimactic.
The first gives an absurd spin to PPE regulations complete with feverish hand sanitising, and there is a comic interruption to a Covid death when a mobile phone starts ringing at a critical moment. The idea of modern loss undermined by the siren call of modern technology seems a little obvious, and the story’s final collapse into grief returns us to the horror of Covid without adding to what many have recently witnessed and felt.
A man romances a woman while unveiling a bandaged face in a story that takes on darkly surrealist tones. It has kooky humour but also feels, in the detail of its final visual reveal, too small for this large-scale stage and some of us squint to see it.
A skit on VR entertainment is the strongest for its physical comedy. A woman experiences the film Titantic on a VR headset, choosing to become its romantic lead. Love is, literally, a projection here, revealing loneliness and want. A final sketch features a warring family of siblings at a pub funeral who come to blows over the urn. Again it contains good physical humour even if we guess that ashes will fly as tempers are raised.
What stands out amid the storytelling is stagecraft: Eric Ronsse’s sound is superb, with drum and bass and electronica as expressive as words. Guillaume Toussaint Fromentin’s lighting is beautiful too and the square curtained set looks like a glowing box in-between scenes.
The cast (Muriel Legrand, Sophie Linsmaux, Aurelio Mergola and Jonas Wertz) are uniformly adept but these stories feel like morsels, with no narrative through-line between sketches beyond overarching themes. They end up appearing like disconnected skits which aspire to surprise and unsettle but do not do enough to achieve that intention.
