Shrimp of few words on rain-drenched camping site
These are not the fragile, pea-brained creatures we might have expected. Instead, the shrimps taking the lead roles in Hotel Modern’s latest production step forward, keen and intrepid, and with well-rehearsed dialogue, too.
One might not have expected the shrimps to be so at ease with their lines, because in the Hotel Modern’s cinematic raree-show theatre, dialogue is generally absent.
Previous productions by Pauline Kalker, Arlène Hoornweg, Herman Helle and sound composer Arthur Sauer include performances about the misery of the trenches and concentration camps and the vast subject of lust, in a Biedermeier setting. Now it is time for a parable. A parable about shrimps who seem to behave as arbitrarily as humans. After two turns in the microwave literally hardened them to the theatre trade, the shrimps were cast for their roles: ‘Some shrimps are melancholy, some are stalwart.’ And this is demonstrably true.
On stage is an extensive array of miniature sets on tables, a kind of marshalling yard. And this is where the shrimp drama unfolds, crisscrossing from left to right, from foreground to background, the images from the finger-sized video cameras sending their images to the large screen at the rear. Composer Sauer is on the spot, creating the live soundtrack; sometimes suitable, sometimes disconcerting.
The shrimps have rather a lot to attend to. They visit the Antiques Roadshow en masse to find out how many of the pieces of furniture they have carried on their shrimp backs deserve to called ‘antique’; they go to the zoo and to the miniature city, weddings, funerals, hospitals and prisons – here they wait, stoically, for the electric chair. They watch a weather report presented by a fellow shrimp (‘When the Germans sent their depressions our way’). And they hang around in garages, where doors are confidently welded on to cars with the torrent of sparks from a firework.
Hotel Modern’s predilection for squalor and obscenity passes the review rather too extensively (deafening drilling during surgery to remove a shrimp tumour, exorcists rolling around in vomit), but this is counterbalanced by plenty of skillfulness and playful inventiveness – although the actors do have rather a lot to say in this shrimp drama.
I actually found the scenes without dialogue the most affecting: the shrimps slogging away at the draughts board, the hiss of the rolling cardboard sea by moonlight, the indefatigable fisher-shrimp in his wheel house in a gale force wind, the three astro-shrimps on the moon and the Edward Hopperesque visit to the carwash and the equally dismal diner with no shrimp snacks. And, of course, the camper shrimp gazing out from his tent, patiently waiting for the rain bombarding his shelter to cease.
And is it disastrous that there is not even a suggestion of a link between these scenes that tumble into and over one another? Well, perhaps it is simply a functional way of drawing our attention to the fact that shrimps stumble through their lives just as doggedly, aimlessly and desperately as humans.
11-02-2009
