“Murdock’s writing shines for the majority of the show – it’s beautifully human and relatable”
It is always exciting when a play gives voice to a rarely heard story. This is one of them; exploring the difficulties of being a sibling carer. However, Dangerous Giant Animals is also the story of a play that sabotages its exceptional beginning and middle with a bafflingly smug ending.
We see Christina Murdock (who also wrote the play) travel through a series of snapshot journeys as Clare, who grew up having to care for her disabled sister, from ages seven to seventeen. The effects on Clare’s family life and education are tumultuous as she tries to balance providing adequate care for her sister, while also having to overcome her guilt for having to make choices that will benefit her life. Murdock’s performance is masterful, as she paints the world before her eyes with staggering clarity and simplicity, while still conveying the complexities of her situation. This is aided by the smart design of the set (Anna Lewis), sound (Nicola Chang), and lighting (David Doyle) that all layer on generous helpings of atmosphere and meaning without ever feeling intrusive.
Murdock’s writing shines for the majority of the show – it’s beautifully human and relatable, and consistently harnesses the drama in the domesticity of any situation. The middle of the show in particular features a string of breathless sequences featuring Clare on a heart-breaking car journey, and later trying to calm down her sister. However, directly following this, Dangerous Giant Animals undermines all the stellar work it had done thus far.
All momentum is ground to a halt as the play feels the need to directly address the audience, condescending them for assuming the plot was going in a particular direction (although given the script makes no prior allusion that this direction was a possibility, it’s a pretty baseless accusation). The show then congratulates itself on being smart and subversive, which feels totally misguided and is deeply disappointing to watch. In the space of a minute, Dangerous Giant Animals descends from having the audience in the palm of its hand to antagonising them for no logical reason. This was a huge misstep on the part of Murdock as well as co-directors Jessica Lazar and Adriana Moore, that consequently makes the remainder of the show simply feel pretentious and self-indulgent.
Dangerous Giant Animals is mostly a touching and insightful deep-dive into an important issue, that’s capped off by a frustrating end that vilifies its audience. I sincerely hope that alterations are made before the show transfers to the Tristan Bates Theatre that will bring a more consistent level of quality, and do justice to the story being told.
“The stage is too often so busy with scenery and props that the extraordinary skill and beauty of the movement itself is lost”
Jasmin Vardimon Company is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with this sumptuous conceptual take on the Medusa myth. The company is renowned for the theatrical choreography of its founder and Artistic Director, Jasmin Vardimon, and Medusa makes full use of a theatre maker’s box of tricks – from extravagant props, costumes and visual effects, to intermittent fragments of spoken text and other performed vocalisations. As the lavish programme is at pains to point out (it contains an academic essay, ‘Transformation and liquid modernity in Jasmin Vardimon’s Medusa’ as well as Vardimon’s own introductory and explanatory words) the Medusa myth has proved fertile ground for intellectual and creative exploration; this work seeks to place itself firmly in that tradition.
Vardimon’s introduction references Sartre and Ovid; Armando Rotondi’s essay ranges from ancient Greek etymology to Zygmunt Bauman by way of John Berger, taking in capitalism and climate change en route. It is a crowded agenda, and the show suffers from it, both literally and metaphorically. The stage is too often so busy with scenery and props that the extraordinary skill and beauty of the movement itself is lost; similarly, the determination to give equal weight to each of the myth’s many manifestations, means that Medusa’s power – both as an icon and as an event – is too diffuse to be properly felt.
That said, the piece provides the audience with some unbelievably beautiful and potent images, and Vardimon’s dancers are frequently breathtaking. The moments that work best are those in which this supreme level of physical artistry is left to speak for itself. Despite all the text and trappings, it is the human body that really does the talking here. The opening sequence, in which yet another Medusa manifestation makes itself felt – that of the jellyfish, or medusa, as it is known in Italy and Spain – is remarkable, not just for the billowing sheet of transparent plastic, but for the way in which the shapes and movements of the dancers’ hands and feet so exactly evoke an underwater world. Similar choreographic invention informs an incredibly disturbing sequence of sexual violence, as well as spellbinding scenes of witchery and enchantment.
Vardimon is clearly an exceptional talent; not only is she director and choregrapher, but sound and set designer too. T.S.Eliot’s masterful poem The Waste Land wouldn’t exist in its present form without Ezra Pound’s editing skills, and one wonders whether Vardimon could also benefit from an equally powerful creative voice to be heard in her process, and to facilitate the judicious trimming down of the material. The company dances at the highest level and the audience needs the space to breathe and to wonder. In its current form, Medusa is such an exhaustive examination of its inspiration, that it leaves the audience not inspired, but exhausted.
