Poignant playthings

Hotel Modern summons up compelling worlds using found objects, puppets, toys and cardboard scale models. Loaves of bread become buses in a city of fridge boxes, shrimps ride around on toy scooters and sprigs of parsley transform into rustling forests. In plain view of the audience, the miniature locations are build on stage. Tiny cameras film the action and the resulting image is projected on a large screen.

This highly inventive Rotterdam-based company is led by actresses Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker, and the artist Herman Helle. One of the two women, obviously pregnant, twirls through the toy scenery, followed by a squirrel. And so begins The Man with Five Fingers. Despite the bizarre humour it is not a strong start. But suddenly the mood changes. What followes is heartrending.

One of the performers interviewed her father about his childhood years during the war, and his frail voice reaches our ears through the speakers. Although the boy who went into hiding survived and his mother escaped from the train to Camp Westerbork, the boy’s father did not return from the camps. This story of a Jewish family is accompanied by perfect images. Fearful puppets jump from burning trains, run through dark streets, conceal themselves in a hole. They seem to be made of clay, those hounded mini-people, and it is not just the matrials from which they are made that makes them seem so fragile: it is also their smallness in relatiuon to their surroundings.

Perhaps even more moving is the fragility of the clay figures in the closing scene. I will never forget the horror as the aeroplane in which they were sitting drilled its way into a skyscraper. It is as if the full magnitude of the Twin Tower disaster was revealed to me for the first time, filmed from within and the whole experience intensified by music.

That’s how terrifying toys can be.

30-11-2004