How a Man Crumbled, Clout Theatre Company
Physical theatre is a collection of human movement and expression, the crazier the better. Clout Theatre Company is currently performing How a Man Crumbled on stage at the BAC (Battersea Arts Centre), which follows up their successful debut Flynch Looking at last years Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Clout Theatre is a small collective formed in Paris of graduates from the Lecoq Physical Theatre School and they have bravely chosen the work of Russian surrealist Daniil Kharms as the basis of How a Man Crumbled.
Kharms was born in St Petersburg in 1905 and spent his short life writing stories for children along with absurd skits, poems and short stories for adults.
His work suits physical theatre, but such a form of expression probably did not exist in his lifetime. He would have enjoyed the intense madness of his work when brought to life on stage. Unfortunately for Kharms, his particular absurdist style and quirks of personality didn’t sit easily in Stalin’s Soviet Union and he died, most likely of starvation, alone in a prison, during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. He was only 36 year old.
He was a determined outsider from his youth. Born Daniil Ivanovich Yavachev he changed his name to Kharms in school for no obvious reason and developed an obsession with Sherlock Holmes. He must have stood out dressed as an English Dandy, smoking his German pipe and floating round the streets of St Petersburg performing poetry and sometimes merely lying in the road and calling it art.
He also formed a collective of like minded Russian Futurists called the Union of Real Art (OBERIU) with the purpose of exploring art around the concept that everyday objects could be empowered with characteristics outside of their norms.
This and various other out-there behaviour landed Kharms a period in exile in the city of Kursk courtesy of the Soviet authorities. Here he wrote safer children’s stories, many of which are school and household favourites in Russia to this day. Ironically he despised children. However, fast forward some 90 years and it also led to the Clout Theatre Company hitting each other with leaks and other vegetables on stage in Battersea. He would surely be pleased.
His adult works were never published in his lifetime. In fact it took until the Glasnost era under Gorbachev for publications of his stories appear in the Russian language. His work is often described as disordered, abnormal and an illustration of a topsy-turvy world, ‘Art is a cupboard, we are not cakes!’, ‘Poems are not pies, we are not herring!’ and such like. George Saunders of the New York Times is one of his champions explaining, ‘In the process of pounding a nail, Kharms has vaporised his own hammer’. Indeed, Kharms seems not to follow any conventions of story telling, he deliberately rejects all forms of structure and claims these lead to ‘falsity clothed as truth, whistling in the dark, propaganda or banality’. So it seems in his mind reality, as everyone else understands it, does not exist. Instead we unleash the madness and chaos of a parallel universe and this is, in fact, the only honest reality.
It is quite hard to sit down and read his work. On the page the short verses of nonsense seem like, well, nonsense;
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears.
Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically.
He couldn't speak, since he didn't have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose.
He didn't even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all!
Therefore there's no knowing whom we are even talking about.
In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.
But performed in costume by Clout from within a suitcase after a bout of throwing lettuce in the middle of his longer work The Old Woman it begins to make a silly sort of sense.
George Ramsay, Sasha Plaige and Jennifer Swingler are the only performers in this production. They almost never leave the stage, except there is no stage. There is only an empty room, an overhead projector projecting on to a blank white wall, a clever sound track and a couple of home made lighting effects. Nor is there much in the way of costume changes neither. The violent energy of the performance comes solely from the three performers. Especially Sasha Plaige, an ex-French figure skater who also happens to speak Russian and makes a hilarious old woman. George Ramsay’s portrayal of mental angst whilst taking an ill-fitting corpse in a suitcase on a train across country is brilliant. The simple jazz interventions are fantastically silly and the writer’s internal devil in Today I Wrote Nothing is sharply played with only the addition of a pair of glasses.
I think Daniil Kharms would have loved the energetic interpretation of his work. It would have inspired him to write more of his particular brand of double-speak and violence. Both George Orwell and Anthony Burgess must have read his work at some point. I can see the echoes of the language used in 1984 and The Clockwork Orange in Kharms’s works, particularly the Zdagger, zdagger, ooster ooster from First Poem From The…
There is something inherently Russian about the physical expression of Clout’s Physical Theatre. It is graceful, energetic, violent, funny and very confusing, all at the same time.
Petrov: Hey, Kamarov, old chap!
Let's catch a few of these gnats!
Kamarov: No, I'm not yet up to that;
We'd do better to catch some tom-cats!
http://www.clout-theatre.com/p/company_27.html
http://www.bac.org.uk/
Clout Theatre is a small collective formed in Paris of graduates from the Lecoq Physical Theatre School and they have bravely chosen the work of Russian surrealist Daniil Kharms as the basis of How a Man Crumbled.
Kharms was born in St Petersburg in 1905 and spent his short life writing stories for children along with absurd skits, poems and short stories for adults.
His work suits physical theatre, but such a form of expression probably did not exist in his lifetime. He would have enjoyed the intense madness of his work when brought to life on stage. Unfortunately for Kharms, his particular absurdist style and quirks of personality didn’t sit easily in Stalin’s Soviet Union and he died, most likely of starvation, alone in a prison, during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. He was only 36 year old.
He was a determined outsider from his youth. Born Daniil Ivanovich Yavachev he changed his name to Kharms in school for no obvious reason and developed an obsession with Sherlock Holmes. He must have stood out dressed as an English Dandy, smoking his German pipe and floating round the streets of St Petersburg performing poetry and sometimes merely lying in the road and calling it art.
He also formed a collective of like minded Russian Futurists called the Union of Real Art (OBERIU) with the purpose of exploring art around the concept that everyday objects could be empowered with characteristics outside of their norms.
This and various other out-there behaviour landed Kharms a period in exile in the city of Kursk courtesy of the Soviet authorities. Here he wrote safer children’s stories, many of which are school and household favourites in Russia to this day. Ironically he despised children. However, fast forward some 90 years and it also led to the Clout Theatre Company hitting each other with leaks and other vegetables on stage in Battersea. He would surely be pleased.
His adult works were never published in his lifetime. In fact it took until the Glasnost era under Gorbachev for publications of his stories appear in the Russian language. His work is often described as disordered, abnormal and an illustration of a topsy-turvy world, ‘Art is a cupboard, we are not cakes!’, ‘Poems are not pies, we are not herring!’ and such like. George Saunders of the New York Times is one of his champions explaining, ‘In the process of pounding a nail, Kharms has vaporised his own hammer’. Indeed, Kharms seems not to follow any conventions of story telling, he deliberately rejects all forms of structure and claims these lead to ‘falsity clothed as truth, whistling in the dark, propaganda or banality’. So it seems in his mind reality, as everyone else understands it, does not exist. Instead we unleash the madness and chaos of a parallel universe and this is, in fact, the only honest reality.
It is quite hard to sit down and read his work. On the page the short verses of nonsense seem like, well, nonsense;
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears.
Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically.
He couldn't speak, since he didn't have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose.
He didn't even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all!
Therefore there's no knowing whom we are even talking about.
In fact it's better that we don't say any more about him.
But performed in costume by Clout from within a suitcase after a bout of throwing lettuce in the middle of his longer work The Old Woman it begins to make a silly sort of sense.
George Ramsay, Sasha Plaige and Jennifer Swingler are the only performers in this production. They almost never leave the stage, except there is no stage. There is only an empty room, an overhead projector projecting on to a blank white wall, a clever sound track and a couple of home made lighting effects. Nor is there much in the way of costume changes neither. The violent energy of the performance comes solely from the three performers. Especially Sasha Plaige, an ex-French figure skater who also happens to speak Russian and makes a hilarious old woman. George Ramsay’s portrayal of mental angst whilst taking an ill-fitting corpse in a suitcase on a train across country is brilliant. The simple jazz interventions are fantastically silly and the writer’s internal devil in Today I Wrote Nothing is sharply played with only the addition of a pair of glasses.
I think Daniil Kharms would have loved the energetic interpretation of his work. It would have inspired him to write more of his particular brand of double-speak and violence. Both George Orwell and Anthony Burgess must have read his work at some point. I can see the echoes of the language used in 1984 and The Clockwork Orange in Kharms’s works, particularly the Zdagger, zdagger, ooster ooster from First Poem From The…
There is something inherently Russian about the physical expression of Clout’s Physical Theatre. It is graceful, energetic, violent, funny and very confusing, all at the same time.
Petrov: Hey, Kamarov, old chap!
Let's catch a few of these gnats!
Kamarov: No, I'm not yet up to that;
We'd do better to catch some tom-cats!
http://www.clout-theatre.com/p/company_27.html
http://www.bac.org.uk/