Welcome to Your Nightmare

The Armature of the Absolute, The Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes

The Barbican Theatre 15/01/09

It was another one of those evenings. I hop on the train to London whilst my friends settle for the pub - again. So, making my way to the Barbican Theatre, homemade sandwich in hand (£3.99 for one in London - are they made of gold?), I prepare myself to soak up a bit of culture. However, on this particular trip, I didn’t feel like I acquired much culture at all, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see.

The Armature of the Absolute is a play depicting the life and works of Alfred Jarry, a French playwright from the late 19^th century. Don’t know Alfred Jarry? Well, he hated hierarchical society, rode bicycles more recklessly than your stupid younger brother and fuelled his body with arsenic - and when he ran out, he drank ink. In short, he was mad. He wrote a series of plays called The Ubu Plays, which caused outrage in the theatres of 1896 with some not so cleverly disguised swearwords.

Compared to the paintings of Salvador Dalí, this puppet performance can only be described as a living nightmare. If you don’t like puppets, then watching this would be like going to a puppet-only boarding school, then coming home one weekend to find that Pinocchio is your long lost brother and your mum’s making you share a room. The design of these puppets ranged from a baboon with teeth on its big, pink bum, a Mr Wobbly cross dinosaur on roller skates and a Pope-bashing Punch (from the Punch and Judy shows). They were grotesque, disturbing and watching them evoked a similar sentiment to that of watching The X Files as a 9-year old.

Perhaps you want to know exactly what this play was about - frankly, so do I. There was a sort of narrator, dressed like a puppet with a half masked face. However, with a heavy accent and a Stephen Hawking voice effect, understanding him was nigh impossible. Therefore, the play seemed to have no through line, no plot and seemingly the only beginnings and ends were life and death and then death as a metaphor for life and… oh, I lost track of all the skeletons, eggs and disturbing puppet-going-through-painful-child-birth scenes (by child I mean lizard/skeleton).

The show is part of the London Mime Festival and sold out in its short time at the Barbican, and despite my disgust I can see why. Whilst watching the performance, I was outraged, repulsed and little bit mentally scarred, but that’s what it was supposed to do. It was a recreation of the outrage Jarry originally caused his poor, unsuspecting, upper class French audience in 1896.

By the end of the show, some people sat and clapped uncomfortably, others sat in bitter defiance with their arms crossed, and some had already walked out. There were some that loved it (each to their own) and they clapped vigorously, but I was one of the uncomfortable ones. Still, as I walked back to the underground station pondering an angry ‘what were you thinking?’ letter to someone high up, I found myself needing to talk about what I’d seen. Not in an ‘I need therapy’ way (surprisingly) but I needed to complain about the defecation, the phallic imagery and the utterly disturbing nature of the piece. How could that show possibly belong in a theatre? But that’s just it, I suppose – why shouldn’t it?

This show broke every taboo in the book. With skilled puppetry, a completely baffling set of scenes and some chilling music, the Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes managed to create something unimaginable; not just the physical performance but the same, or at least similar, feeling felt by an audience of over one hundred years ago. It might not be my cup of tea, but these guys, despite the deep trauma they may have caused, do deserve some praise for a performance beyond even your wildest nightmares.

Please comment if you have anything to add to this review of 'The Armature of the Absolute'.