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It pretty much says it all in the title. This completely mental, darkly funny, makeshift puppet show is about two bears – a polar bear and a koala to be exact – on a spaceship in the future, who find themselves in a tricky situation whilst in the orbit of a planet called Meterotopia. If you think that all sounds a little on the surreal side, wait till you watch it (which you definitely should) – it gets really, really weird.
Company Collapsing Horse’s show isn’t weird for weird’s sake though, it comes with a genuinely funny script with one-liners that will make you burst with laughter ,and off-kilter, clowning humour that seems effortless. It’s not: Eoghan Quinn’s multi-layered script is a thing of craft, silly, ridiculous, but with a strong plot arch, it’s writing that embraces mad jumps of the imagination while making sure everything still seems somehow plausible. From the Russian bear with malapropisms, to a narrator who sounds a lot like Matt Berry’s Toast of London, to the freaky gremlin-type creature whose imaginary lover is just his own voice recorded on to a tape deck: here are some truly oddball creations that are a complete blast to watch.
If you’re a ‘Game of Thrones’ fan you may have got used to not seeing nasty king Joffrey, but Jack Gleeson, the actor who plays him, is part of this company, oddly enough playing another evil ruler, this time the dictator of Meterotopia. But the show is far from an unhappy hegemony, this is an ensemble company and Gleeson, along with Quinn, Cameron Macaulay and Aaron Heffernan jump from character to character. Sometimes their arms are up the backsides of some pretty scrubby-looking puppets (the Muppets this ain’t), sometimes they just wear pieced-together costumes that look as though they may fall apart at any moment.
In fact Heffernan’s entire designs look as though they have been thrown together last minute by a blind old lady, everything is hand drawn, a little bit broken, a little bit dirty – even the shadow puppet title sequences are wobbly and skewiff. Much like the entire show.
But it all adds to the charm and humour of ‘Bears In Space’ which is like nothing else you’ll see in London at the moment. The cast gleefully embrace the makeshift madness and take us on a riotous, hilarious, trippy journey to infinity and beyond.