Blind Man’s Song, Pleasance Dome, Review

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Rating (out of 5)
4
Show info
Company
Theatre Re
Production
Guillaume Pigé (director), Devised by the company and Guillaume Pigé, Alex Judd (music) Katherine Graham (lighting design), Malik Ibheis (costume and props design), A.C. Smith (Dramaturge)
Performers
Alex Judd, Guillaume Pigé, Selma Roth
Running time
60mins

On a smoky stage, an iron bed with a bespectacled head and footboards sits in one corner and a piano with a violin sits in another. From the shadows, a bowler hatted blind man in a long grey dressing gown (Alex Judd) appears and stumbles around flailng an iron stick. In his hand is a diaphanous green hankie that seems to transport him to a far remembered or imagined world as he inhales its memory.

Again from the shadows two figures (Guillaume Pigé and Selma Roth) emerge, their heads sheathed in a white cloth like the two figures in René Magritte’s painting The Lovers the inspiration for this beautifully co-ordinated piece of mime and physical theatre showing memories of loss and the power of life inside the mind.

Just as the characters magically appear and disappear, so it is with Judd’s music whose sounds appear of their own volition when the blind man who appears to have been playing moves or turns and the music continues to play. He’s pretending, you say! Not so. This illusion is another part of the mystery of this manifestation of a sightless man’s inner life.

The bed by turn waltzes, shoogles to the rumbling mechanical sounds of a train and is an aparatus for some discreet graceful gymnastics from Pigé and Roth.

A truly evocative range of music from Alex Judd shifts from raw discordant to filmic to haunting romantic waltzes that adds to the atmosphere of this poignant performance and is on sale after the show priced £8.

Blind Man’s Song is informed by interviews with blind and visually-impaired people.

6–30 August 2015, 3.30pm. Age recommend: 8+