If it’s
high art you’re after, this interactive event at the deliriously dilapidated
Museum Of will doubtless disappoint. If you’re looking for surrealism’s
delicate blend of the absurd with the profound, ‘the Tennis Show, will
leave you feeling that at least half the entrance fee was a waste of money.
But if, like me, you exchange your expectations for the pink hot water bottle
they hand you at the door, then Shunt’s unbridled romp through the halls
of experimental theatre will surprise, delight and bemuse in equal measure.
The premise for the cascade of eclectic vignettes that make up the evening
is a mixed doubles tennis match in the 1920’s. The audience is divided
up by gender and marched through to their respective changing rooms. What
follows is a series of short sketches, verbal and visual, some witty, some
disturbing, which play on the class and gender barriers that define this terribly
British game in the Roaring Twenties. We are then led out to rejoin the boys
and watch the match. As the hour unfolds, any coherence or traceable plot
entirely done away with in a veritable bombardment of disjointed, frenzied
sights and sounds.
The strength of the shoe is not in it’s technical virtuosity, which
lack the assured polish of professionalism or in the seamless development
of ideas, which particularly in the final stages, fall into tangled disarray,
but in the sheer, electric inventiveness and infectious enthusiasm of every
member of the young company. And for every sketch which fails to ignite, there
is another that blazes away in the imagination long after time has been called
and the ultra violet lights have gone down.
Lucy Powell
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