Everyday and exceptional

Death makes heroes, losers or terrorists of us. You can meet death watching tv, lying in bed, flying into a skyscraper or being overpowered by a unicorn. Hotel Modern’s The Man with Five Fingers is a vanitas performance, the theatrical counterpart to paintings featuring an extinguished candle, a sand glass or a skull that confront people with their own transitoriness. This group from Rotterdam successfully illuminate death in a variety of manifestations, realistic and dreamt of. Tiny cameras are used to film in scale-model stage sets, and the resulting images are displayed on a large screen at the rear of the stage. On stage, in front of the screen, the actors feverishly create the live animation films – sometimes taking part in them.

The performance is beautifully composed. After images of everyday death (the camera creeps into the radio and imagines the news) and other fatal incidents, the two pièces de résistance are an interview with Pauline Kalker’s father (a Jew who survived World War II) and a film of the Twin Towers catastrophe. Elsewhere an absurdist performance by Herman Helle with a dead fish provides some comic relief. Hotel Modern’s low tech puppet theatre is highly imaginative – sometimes terrifyingly so. Death is unique and mundane. Just like a man with five fingers.

24-10-2004