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She had a big hit last spring with her play Vakuumpakkede mennesker (Shrinkwrapped People) at Kaleidoskop Theatre. And last Monday her R\O|O/M opened at CaféTeatret, subtle and winning. The characters are strangely hollow. A bit like the cement block that fills the whole basement in Catia Hauberg’s stifling damp setting with its precisely quivering neon tubes.
There is nothing inside the block – and yet it is full of pent-up life. ”The room is stronger than the walls” is the mysterious moral. Well yes, fine, sounds reasonable….and that’s what the characters are like too: they have no particularly distinguishing features. They are only really their age – an old man and a young man. They don’t even have names. Their personalities only start to emerge when they encounter the cold block of the cement basement. ”Old houses have soul,” says the old landlord. ”But not underfloor heating,” responds the young architect.” A-ha. Ha, ha.
Men in the prime of life
The director Lars Romann Engel demonstrates a tantalising sense of the grotesque in this nothingness universe. Shifts in mood occur imperceptibly – and always before the audience has begun to expect them. And fortunately Engel has not over-activated the actors’ faces. He has put everything on a low flame, almost like film acting on stage – a kind of minimal realism.
Ole Westh-Madsen just shuffles on in underwear and bristly goatee. Out of sorts and unwashed. Puffy-cheeked. He’s not out to please anyone. But we nonetheless identify with this man’s lonely heartbreak. And Ole Westh-Madsen again demonstrates his formidable talent to depict the dogged loner – the oddball that many of us would turn into if no one out there in the real world kept us in line. The young man in the knitted beanie, on the other hand, comes straight off the urban street. And, on the surface, Frank Thiel plays this boundary-bound architect with an empty expression, blank as a new sketchpad. Once provoked, however, lines soon start to appear on his face. He immediately tries to erase them, but the shock remains in his eyes. His arms divide the one room of the basement into compartments, with an outstretched farce-arm chopping up the space so that the ”square metres are recycled”. Curious and naive – and a razor-sharp portrait of this upright, unimaginative Danish lad. No stealing from Frank’s cake tin!
Woman in the whitest magic
But every good ghost story is haunted by a woman. Here it is Anne Birgitte Lind Feigenberg with a strangely supernatural look in her super-blue eyes and ghostly eeriness sprinkling across her red hair, which renders her untouchable and sensuous at one and the same time. And yet her echoing voice pales in comparison with the almost tactile sight of her white arms. No wonder the men can’t sleep once she has visited them during the night!
Julie Thor Fryd writes towards the point where realism meets magic. Where a story might change into dream, where it is not necessarily obvious what is reality and what is nightmare. Perhaps because reality mostly is nightmare?
Or because reality is magical?
”She had no liking for cut flowers,” goes an inscrutable Fryd-line. I hope, however, that Fryd and the basement-crew will receive five out of the five bouquets on offer for their sound wall.
Anne Middelboe Christensen
Information, September 6th. 2006
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