Theatre reviews: Size Matters | Coffee With Sugar?

Size Matters, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Coffee With Sugar? Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★

One of the great joys of Edinburgh’s annual Manipulate Festival - and of its development since its first edition in 2008 - has been the emergence of a generation of visual theatre makers, here in Scotland, whose work now ranks with the best and most interesting in Europe.

No artist represents that development more vividly than the Japanese-born and Edinburgh-based theatre-maker Mamoru Iriguchi; and his latest work Size Matters - developed with Manipulate Arts, and produced by Vanishing Point of Glasgow - is a hugely inventive puppet extravaganza, dressed to the hilt in fabulous kabuki-style orange-red and yellow costumes, in which two human actors, each masked to look like the other, suddenly realise that they have been nurturing, inside their skin, two fast-growing alternative versions of themselves, who - once they escape into the outside world - rapidly grow to giant size, perhaps 20 metres tall.

Cue a fantastic 50-minute explosion of thoughts and ideas about this huge disparity in size between the original characters - called Tangerine and Sunshine, and wonderfully played by Iriguchi and Julia Darrouy - and their new companions, who, with the help of a series of differently-sized but identical puppets, take on the role of giant black-clad puppeteers, guiding the much smaller original characters through their brief lives.

Iriguchi is a zoologist by training, and notes how larger animals tend to have slower heartbeats, deeper, slower voices, and longer life-spans, as if physical size could stretch and bend time itself. He is also deeply meta-theatrical, fascinated by the act of storytelling itself; and after the show’s bearded puppet narrator suddenly dies, he is instantly replaced by a human actor (Gavin Pringle) identical to the puppet (although larger), who urges the giant puppeteers to relive their odd and intense physical relationship with the original characters who gave them life.

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Some aspects of this idea work better than others, in theatrical terms. What’s certain, though, is that Iriguchi has assembled a remarkable team to create a wholly original, memorable and disturbing show, which also has a fine sense of its own absurdity. From co-director and co-designer Fergus Dunnet, to sound designer Greg Sinclair and lighting man Andrew Gannon, everyone involved seems inspired and captivated by Iriguchi’s strange but vivid vision.

The puppets are sensational, alternative versions of Iriguchi and Darrouy that almost look more like them than they do themselves; and from colonialism and exploitation to the mystery of death itself, this is a show that doesn’t so much explore themes as spray them around like confetti, while never quite losing sight of its own mysterious and magical narrative arc.

The theme is much more focussed, meanwhile, in KMZ Kollektiv of Germany’s Coffee With Sugar?, briefly at the Traverse this week, a vivid collage of dance, sound, narrative and visual image-making in which theatre maker and performer Laia RiCa - born in El Salvador, now living and working in Berlin - offers a lyrical yet fierce critique of German economic colonialism in Guatemala, home to huge coffee plantations which, throughout the 20th century, were largely owned by major German companies.

Accompanied by fine music, vocals and occasional personal reflections from Cuban-born musician-composer Yahima Piedra Cordova, RiCa reflects on the almost unthinking exploitation of her indigenous ancestors that enabled the production of both coffee and sugar in South America. From the screen, as RiCa pours and mixes coffee beans and sugar to create live images that combine with Daniela del Pomar’s powerful videography, an indigenous servant girl in a picture of colonial masters asks “when did we become ashamed of being indigenous?”

And after RiCa spins herself a candyfloss white self out of sugar, she offers some superb dance moves that express the full richness of her almost-lost indigenous heritage; in a 55-minute show that is a shade fragmentary, and sometimes simply states the obvious, but also vibrates with its own disturbing, angry power.

The Manipulate Festival continues at venues across Edinburgh until 10 February

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