Compagnie of Strangers
WHEN Moomsteatern, the Swedish theatre company employing actors with learning disabilities, was born, all traditional social and therapeutic aims were banned and purely artistic goals put in their place.
So Moomsteatern manager Kjell Stjernholm explained during an impromptu presentation at the Unity Theatre bar when a software malfunction delayed the UK premiere of Compagnie of Strangers by an hour.
It was an ethos which stood the group and the audience in excellent stead on Saturday, offering a strange, surreal, thoroughly unique theatre experience full of surprises and unsettling images.
Set in almost perpetual gloom, Compagnie offered a dreamscape of music, dance, shadowplay and mime.
Presented as part of DaDaFest, it loosely follows the journey into the past of an old man who, in a clever play of shadows, is shown rising from his wheelchair and becoming a boy.
It was reminiscent in style of a darker version of Cirque du Soleil.
Scenes flowed from the blackly comic to the disturbing.
