★★★★

“the overall effect is to seduce us with a series of visuals that pack surprising punch, for all their whimsy”

The Belgian companies Focus and Chaliwaté have brought a co-production to the Peacock Theatre as part of 2025 Mime London. Their show Dimanche is a charming and whimsical piece of visual theatre, featuring puppets, humans, and sets that are both miniaturized and full size. The locations are as varied as an arctic landscape, a desert island complete with tsunami, and the house of an ordinary couple (with grandma) trying to adapt to climate change. This is a show for all ages. Children in particular will appreciate the cute animals which range from polar bears, sharks and flamingoes.

Dimanche arrives in London under the umbrella of Mime London, which specializes in finding companies whose work is hard to categorize. Curators Helen Lannaghan and Joseph Seelig have teamed up to take the place of the London International Mime Festival, which closed in 2023. Mime London is smaller scale than the LIMF, but still adept at bringing intriguing work to brighten a dark and post holiday January. With well equipped theatres such as the Barbican and Peacock hosting the festival, it’s a chance for West End audiences to see work that is usually performed abroad.

The work of Compagnie Focus and Chaliwaté in particular resists easy definition. Dimanche features three performers who take on a variety of roles in a series of wide ranging locations. They work as actors, as puppeteers, and even turn into the locations themselves from time to time. The show opens in the arctic. We watch an intrepid film crew document the effects of climate change. Our parka clad team attempt everything from driving in a blizzard to crossing unstable ice. Sometimes the scenes are miniaturized, in which case the body of one performer becomes the snowy landscape. Tiny cars drive over the curves and precipitous bends, headlights blazing through the darkness. When the ice gives way, and the audience finds itself plunged underwater, a video projected onto a screen takes over the action. For most companies, this would be sufficient challenge. But this team is just getting warmed up. From arctic exteriors the audience is transported to a domestic interior where rising temperatures outside make even the most mundane of household tasks fraught with risk. From malfunctioning electrics to melting furniture, we see Grandma and her family attempt everyday activities as though the heat were completely normal. Only when the wind and the rain literally carry the family away do we realize that the joke’s on us. This is what climate change looks like.

Compagnie Focus and Chaliwaté manage to pack in an impressive number of climate change vignettes in just over an hour. They present their theme with humour and a lightness of touch that belies the seriousness of the subject. If there’s one criticism, it is that there’s no overarching narrative, which makes it challenging to tune immediately into each scene change. At other times, the scenery (and the show) seems a bit lost on the large stage of the Peacock Theatre. But the overall effect is to seduce us with a series of visuals that pack surprising punch, for all their whimsy. The ice is melting, polar bears are being stranded on icebergs, and further south, people are struggling with hotter weather, more violent storms, and seas that threaten everything on land. Dimanche makes its point while beguiling us with cute baby polar bears stranded on icebergs, and flapping flamingos caught in destructive winds.

Dimanche is a delightful show that teaches with its entertainment. Kudos to Mime London for making Compagnie Focus and Chaliwaté part of the 2025 line up. See this show if you can. It won’t be in London long!

THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE at Riverside Studios

★★★★

“The anecdotes and reminiscences are poetic in style and Higgins has an energy that rises as he slowly takes his foot off the soft pedal”

From 1983 to 1985, ‘Memorial Device’ was the best band that no-one’s ever heard of. Mysterious, post-punk legends, they hailed from (but never left) the small North Lanarkshire town of Airdrie, just a dozen or so miles East of Glasgow. They defined an era. Well, at least they defined the formative years of fledgeling fanzine journalist Ross Raymond (Paul Higgins). Forty years on, Ross has invited us to share his memories. To celebrate and resurrect the group that exploded in a haze of surreal glory before imploding again into the mists of unreliable memory.

Paul Higgins, in the utterly convincing guise of Ross Raymond, wanders onto the stage, slightly nervous at first, to spend the next hour delivering a mockumentary. Supported by press cuttings, recorded interviews, demo tapes and memorabilia he presents fiction as fact. Before long it becomes pretty impossible to differentiate reality from make believe. The gritty truthfulness of Higgins’ delivery recalls the time and the place perfectly, reinforced by Anna Orton’s minimal set that replicates the sort of back room dive that such a band would have rehearsed and gigged in. You can almost smell the stale cigarettes and musty beer fumes.

“This is Memorial Device” is unique and slightly odd. Adapted by Graham Eatough from David Keenan’s cult novel of the same title, it falls into a no-mans-land somewhere between drama and musical, lecture and parody. The anecdotes and reminiscences are poetic in style and Higgins has an energy that rises as he slowly takes his foot off the soft pedal. The further he delves into his memories, the more animated he becomes as he draws us into the nostalgia of a world he is building around him. He assembles the past band members from broken mannequins lying in a flight case as though resting in a coffin. When he dissembles them again to put them back, you know that he is mourning an age lost and gone forever.

Yet, for all that we are drawn into his enthusiasm (Ross Raymond is undoubtedly a die-hard fan), there are moments that drag. The use of video footage comprising a series of talking heads adds credence to the myth, but occasionally go on too long. If we were at home watching on our TV sets, these are the points at which we’d get up to make a cup of tea. Fortunately, though, Higgins is always on hand to pull us back in. The hypnotic effect is emphasised by the monotonic and metronomic music, composed by sound designer Gavin Thomson and musician Stephen McRobbie – the latter is the lead singer and guitarist of real life, Glasgow band ‘The Pastels’ who, unlike the eponymous combo, are still around.

It is testament to the writing and to Higgins’ performance that it is easy to think this is all real. We buy into the fabrication. Like the novel, this show will gain cult status. We almost expected to be offered merchandise on the way out, and the urge to look up ‘Memorial Device’ on Spotify was irresistible. We have been touched by the stories of these band members. Particularly of frontman Lucas Black, who suffered from having no short-term memory. Everything was written down in a little red notebook (his own memorial device) which Ross Raymond has kept for forty years. It is more than a history lesson; it is a dream-like journey into a music scene and its off-beat characters. Some died, some disappeared. But Higgins keeps them all alive. Even though they never really lived. That takes a particular kind of skill – one that Higgins and the co-creators of the show clearly possess.

It may not be to everybody’s taste, but I doubt it is looking for universal appeal. At curtain call, Higgins thanks us for coming to listen. The pleasure was all ours.

DIMANCHE

Peacock Theatre

★★★★

“the overall effect is to seduce us with a series of visuals that pack surprising punch, for all their whimsy”

DIMANCHE

Peacock Theatre

Reviewed on 30th January 2025

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Mihaela Bodlovic

Previously reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

DIMANCHE

DIMANCHE

DIMANCHE

THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE at Riverside Studios

★★★★

“The anecdotes and reminiscences are poetic in style and Higgins has an energy that rises as he slowly takes his foot off the soft pedal”

THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE at Riverside Studios

Reviewed on 26th April 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Mihaela Bodlovic

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE

THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE

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