Cheerful theater, with a distinct preference for light horror and outlandish humour

Surrealism, according to De Lautréamont, is as ‘beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.’ If he was right, there is surrealism galore in Banana and Oyster Knife, the new play by Hotel Modern. This time the theatre company have left their cameras and projection screens at home – and they don’t disappoint.

Humans surround themselves with things. Lots and lots of things. We rarely pay attention to many of them, but Hotel Modern is determined to put a stop to that. At the left and rear of the stage stand two high walls of boxes – cardboard boxes that hold the promise of the things they contain. Centre stage is the battleground, with six other boxes serving as plinths. Herman Helle, Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker take it in turns to place objects on them, and while one of them makes their move the others consider their response, as if this is a game of chess.

They begin – logically and fittingly – with brains (we later discover that they are actually cauliflowers). These are followed by an assortment of objects: balls, jars of sausages, asparagus, peanut butter, toilet rolls, soldiers’ helmets, washing-up brushes, an indoor plant, skulls, balloons, boots, stuffed animals, a toilet duck, and one of those curious cactuses with a red ball on top – to name but a few. Many more appear from the boxes large and small. The collection seems to be inexhaustible.

Soon enough, the players move on from single objects to combinations. Objects and shapes start competing with each other, becoming interrelated, and conflicting with or echoing one another. The players ponder long and hard on what new combination should follow. If it works, they glow with a sense of triumph, and occasionally applaud one another. One unusual combination follows another. My daughter, who has a well-tuned understanding of such things, said, ‘You could take a photo at any moment, and you’d always have a good picture.’

Hotel Modern have well-known the world over for their use of live animation in theatre, with plays in which events such as the horrors of the world wars are enacted at doll-house size. Using scale models in which the actors manipulate self-made puppets, objects and anything else they need to tell their story, they film the action with small cameras and project these scenes onto a large screen.

In Banana and Oyster Knife everything takes place at a scale of 1:1. The company displays a distinct preference for light horror and outlandish humour, such as in the fairy tale that Herman Helle tells. I suspect that the imaginative mind of model builder, absurdist theatre maker Helle had a large part to play in the development of this piece. Photographs of Helle are on display in the foyer, showing him in the foreground and something meaningful in the background – they are selfies, but from a time before that word existed.

Only two things are missing from this dynamic museum of everyday objects: a banana and an oyster knife.

4-11-2017