-->
The Children and the Animals came onto the streets
Tokyo Metropolitan
Art Center May 5th 2019
The charming black-humor children’s production with the
somewhat leading name was performed during the Golden Week, when parents had a
full ten days to fill with appropriate entertainment. The play had been
described by The Guardian as part Dickens, part Kafka, part Pantomime, part silent
film, and lived up to its billing. Like Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton, and the
Gorey aesthetic they dwell upon, these young performers know how to amuse and
educate, while tapping the dark side. Their Golem—seen in full on YouTube—was a
more mature work, far-reaching in its social significance for the moment. But Children similarly hit a delicate nerve to
provoke curiosity, disgust, and amusement.
The Troupe evoke
the silent film era of camerawork, faded colors, and primitive CG, a kind of high-tech
retro performance. The white-painted faces were clownish, with costumes
resembling a Buster Keaton epic silent film.Three actors stand besides flats or
stick their heads out of TV-sized holes. Around them, frontal projections
depict a picturesque nightscape, twinkling and shuddering at times, as though a
film got stuck in a sprocket. Rain, puffs of smoke from a fumigating spray can,
hordes of children, various offices and stores are projected around the living
actors. Electronic music, patter-song banter, and narration coordinate these so
there are seamless transitions. Even the projection of little Evie next to her
mother doesn’t seem strained, as she walks with the mechanical movements of a
cut-out doll next to her equally stiff Mother.
When portraying a bed, a kiosk, or a tub, an actual rectangular screen
is placed in front of the actor and the projection on it creates the scenery.
Even precise properties give us
extra-ordinary perspectives, as when an evil Frenchwoman steals the Mayor’s
cat, we see it, hidden in the real bag she holds, through a projection. So
seamless and well-drawn were the backgrounds, costumes, and actors that some of
the scenes took on a lyric beauty despite the complexity of technique: the
Caretaker, running across a bridge, escaping Bayou Mansions; the children
playing in the park, a Seurat-like sunny pastoral.
Other
special effects were effective precisely because they were obvious and easily
done. The Caretaker, seen through a train window, accompanied by a chugging
piano tune, played the two long notes of a steam engine whistle on a recorder.
Mrs. Epes slept peacefully until black hands, from all four corners of her “bed”,
attacked her in a nightmare: her daughter had been kidnapped! The piano-player
kept the rhythms and actions going, much as it must have in the silent era,
while camera circle-fades and spotlights highlighted certain characters. This
was a 1-2-3D “spectacle,” charming in its apparent simplicity, brilliant in its
imagination and aesthetic choices, and a technical tour-de-force. I don’t
usually enjoy the Dumbtype-like “cool” combinations of performers and
projections, but this low-key type of “home-made magic” seems a more
humanistic, and authentic, way of expressing the world today.
* * *
The story
is rather thin. The rundown flats of “Bayou mansions” are inhabited by petty thieves,
drug addicts, and prostitutes. It is infested with cockroaches, its walls
peeling, its lights smashed, its plumbing backed up, and its stairwells dark.
Our heroine, an art teacher, arrives with her daughter from a village, called
to do service in this miserable community. She soon finds that gangs of
children, armed with slingshots and stomps, have wrecked the place. The seller
of ice cream, the peddlars in bricabrac, and ordinary citizens are accosted,
overwhelmed, and hide behind their doors. The petty thief’s daughter leads a
gang of “pirates,” increasingly ferocious as they attempt to make the
newspapers with their exploits.
The only one to show any kindness
is a Caretaker, sweeping away the dirt and vermin, fixing lights, and saving
money for his one-way ticket out of there. The rest of the inhabitants are terrified,
hiding behind their doors, in their filthy tubs. Mrs. Epes and her daughter Eve
try to make an art activity involving pasta but are attacked and abused.
Nothing
seems to be able to stop these child gangs until they despoil the Mayor’s
beloved park. The family picnics and playgrounds are overrun, so the Mayor
conceives a plan to provide “granny’s gumdrops,” containing part sweet and part
medicine, a pill which will in seven days reduce any child to a silent,
obedient zombie. They cart off the children, just as the Caretaker has packed
his bag and set to go. His dear Evie is in the van so he follows her to a
country lab where they children are being offered gumdrops, saves her, and
escapes back to the flats. Her frantic mother, having found no help with the
police, detectives, or hospitals is delighted, returning to the village, giving
up on saving these people. And life goes on as before, but with the children
returned home silent, zombie-like, until the next revolution.
* * *
I hope this production is seen by more than families, for
the lessons of craftsmanship, timing, and inspiring frisson of projection and
human deserve emulation by Japanese artists.
Comments