Theatre

Last time European theatre company New International Encounter had a show at Battersea, some critics worried it might herald the end of the Arts Centre. Not that ‘The End of Everything Ever’ was poorly received: it was just that back in 2007, when Wandsworth Borough Council brandished a funding axe over BAC’s neck, the title had a doomy ring for the many theatre-makers and BAC-lovers who feared for the theatre’s future.

There’s no prophetic pun to be found in the title of NIE’s latest devised piece ‘My Life With the Dogs’, which is based on the true story of a four-year-old boy who ran wild with a pack of Moscow strays. BAC will finally evict its spectacular and lucrative lodger, Punchdrunk’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ on April 12. But with closure averted, a 125-year lease secured from the council and plans soon to be announced for a second Playground Project, BAC is in no danger of going to the dogs.
Feature continues

When BAC does rid itself of the Red Death, it will make more space again for forward-facing experimental small companies like NIE: made up of the kind of people BAC has been so instrumental in bringing on and supporting over the years. As Alex Byrne (NIE’s founder and artistic director) explains via webcam, his is a no-frills company that ‘came together after I graduated from Central and did a Czech residency… because we wanted to take ownership of our own work, and because we shared a certain style: brash physical comedy, but with delicate feelings.’

NIE is multilingual: its first show ‘My Long Journey Home’ retold the true story of ‘Andras Tomas, a Hungarian boy who was press-ganged by the Wehrmacht in 1942 then lost for years in the Soviet psychiatric system,’ and was made in a Czech village gymnasium, with its English, German and Norwegian script tested on an audience of locals: ‘the baker, his brother, and some girls from the local pub’. And despite its diminutive size NIE is a genuine multinational: members hail from small towns in Hampshire or the Czech Republic, and rely on Skype to keep in touch, having all spread far away from their origins to Nuremburg, Cambridge, Oslo, Berlin and Prague.

‘We have a collective signature, but it’s not like we live in a shed somewhere together in Slovakia,’ says performer Kjell Moberg. ‘We’re not that kind of collective.’ The devised theatre that the group produces is caught up in stories of migration and return across Europe: the kind of lives that they (and many artists in search of cheap rents) volunteer for, but which others, now and in the dark days of the past century, have less choice about. As Byrne explains: ‘The story of Andras Thomas became part of a trilogy of work about transport or loss, around WWII.’ And the story of dog-boy Ivan Mishukov ‘will be the first in a new trilogy about contemporary experience. Russian social workers reckon that lost children who turn up at Leningrad station are approached by a paedophile within three or four minutes. Travelling in Europe you can imagine why turning to the dog pack might have been Ivan’s safest option.’

Mishukov’s story also has strong implications for language and movement which NIE, who are strongly influenced by Lecoq’s physical theatre and performers like Czech theatre-artist Petr Nikl who invents installations and machines from dumped and found objects. ‘Nikl’s aesthetic,’ says NIE’s musical director David Pagan, ‘is influential because it’s strong and poor at the same time.’ If so, it should be right up the back streets and rubbish bins of ‘My Life with the Dogs’. Costumes and sets will be bare, but the music is, says Pagan, intended to furnish ‘a flavour of the ’90s’ and a ‘punk edge of energy and danger’. Which all sounds sexy enough to pull in some of the younger punters that Punchdrunk lured to Battersea. Though for BAC old-timers, it may just bring back memories of leaner, edgier times.

‘My Life With the Dogs’ is at BAC Studio 69 from April 14.