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Perô
Until Oct 12 2008
- Recommended
This event has finished
Unicorn Theatre, Tooley St, London, SE1 2HZ
Rating:
By Ronnie Haydon

Posted: Mon Sep 29 2008
With a script and score by the gloriously witty Guus Ponsioen (pictured), Michel Tournier’s deep little story of a lovelorn baker’s moonlit travails proves a wicked romantic comedy in an hour-long adaptation by Holland’s Speeltheater.

Perô the baker and Columbina the laundress – moon-faced puppets all in white – live side by side in narrow cottages in the village of Fanghetto. Manipulating them, flesh-and-blood performers Inez de Bruijn and Tim Velraeds are a feisty pair, who find each other irresistible while having their puppet characters’ interests at heart. Overseeing all of this is another mismatched couple: the Sun (Annemarie Maas) and the Moon (Guus Ponsioen), who sit at pianos, sing and fling insults at each other. From these three viewpoints romance takes shape.

It’s the shifting perspectives that create openings for moments of grand operatics and quiet tragedy. Round-eyed Perô’s lonely stoking of his midnight furnace makes for a touching, if heavily symbolic, scene. The comic potential of Columbina’s seduction by leggy interloper Palentino, who turns her head with his lascivious use of colour in a hitherto monochrome set, is saucily explored. It’s tickling to see a bunch of children scandalised by a plumptious female puppet’s shameless come-ons to innocent Perô’s love rival. Even funnier is the short-lived idyll enjoyed by Columbina and Palentino – a sunny countryside paradise that unfolds from a large box, then quickly loses its lustre as the relationship moves into autumnal drudgery.

Swept along on such rollicking visual gags and clever comic songs, doughy Perô rises from zero to hero in this Dutch theatre company’s priceless UK debut.