Don Quijote and White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

Don Quijote. Photo: Julian Hughes

Playworks' innocuous studio space on Albert Street in St Ann's is transformed into a lo-fi, DIY make-shift theatre and a deliriously playful hour and ten minutes zip by in the company, or rather absence, of one of literature's most famous dreamers. This is Kier Cooper, Tom Frankland and Ültimo Combio's Don Quijote - an addictive blend of literature, politics, punk music, flamenco and power tools. This is a literal deconstruction of the book - there's a dislike of journalists using literally when the ought to use figuratively but here the text is hacked to pieces with a buzz saw, reassembled and then broken apart again. This is a shredded Cervantes but it retains the spirit, the power and the playfulness of its 400 year old source text. It is an Orange Juice version - they Rip It Up and Start Again.

The visual imagery of the opening segments of the show is very clever shadow theatre - it at once transports you to the blurred world of Quijote and Cervantes. Windmills, hay-lofts, churches, castles, peasants, charging knights, grizzled snarling monsters and more windmill trip along the partition wall. Then the eponymous Don Quijote - a different actor in each performance, like White Rabbit,  Red Rabbit later in this review - is revealed. Today this is Selina Mosinski, who is installed pre-show under a dust sheet which is dramatically thrown back; she pantomines the famous jousting with windmills (the windmills are made of balsa wood models, plastic combs and gaffa tape) and then embarks with audience member Kate, as her intrepid Sancho Panza, on their quest wrapped in cumbersome cardboard armour. They leave the space for most of the rest of the performance.

We then are told stories: we hear about covering primary school children with petals of flowers by throwing them into fan blowing out onto their school playground, the incredible dancing, drum soloing, soothsaying monkey and Don Quijotes today - people such as The late Colin Pillinger, Pussy Riot and Brian Haw, also now sadly deceased. These (traditionally) unfulfilled characters railing against/working toward an idea are truly the modern antecedent and there is an unmistakable romance in their beautiful failures.

Dramaturgically, the script leaves gaps and there are leaps left for us but these gaps are a joy. The role of the participant-performer and what their tale of their journey with the Don, delivered to us in a  self-penned monologue, means is not spelled out to the huddled seated audience. We may look like primary school students, we are not treated like them. The re-casting our idea of a romanticised Cervantes as a disillusioned amputee war veteran rotting in a prison cell makes the man, as much as the content of his book, being something striving for escapism. Equally, with Quijote believing his flights of fancy and fictions to be true, the performers carefully play with the ideas of authenticity and the willing suspension of disbelief on stage - most notably through an intervention via Skype with one of their collaborators before his body boarding lesson. The shows brightness come from all of this - it is wondrous and romantic, in spite of being doomed it is totally uplifting and succeeds in stamping a thoroughly modern reading on Cervantes’ book, contextualising it and making the points within it anew.
 

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by contrast doesn't have the power tools but does have the powerful message. Written by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, the script tells four distinct stories: what is imagined going on in the room of the performance, a retelling of the writer's uncle's social experiment with his rabbits in their hutch, allegorical dumbshow of rabbits at the theatre with thuggish bears, Stasi-like crows and actor-cheetahs playing ostriches and, lastly, a mediation on suicide. This was performed three times across the festival by different actors who have never seen the script before - they are presented with it on stage in a sealed envelope by Hatch's Nathan Miller. They are also given a vial of poison which is stirred into one of the two glasses of water on stage. Chekhov's gun is in full effect here - the poison must come into play by the end, surely?

For the show I saw it was Zoo Indigo's Ildiko Rippel performing, although there were performances with Chris Sainty and Gramophone Hannah Stone earlier in the week. This became an interesting culture clash as we had an Iranian writer writing in English with a native German speaker reading the text. Ildiko's bright, funny and ad-libbed performance was the perfect juxtaposition to the darker moments of the piece and gave the zoomorphic story of the rabbit at the theatre a Jackanory feel. It is a show rich in allegory and in this offers a range of readings to its audience. It creates an absurd picture of the controls put on people all over the world, especially creative people. The idea too of cheetahs playing ostriches, burying their head in the sand, makes an interesting comment on the artists making work that kowtows to external demands and their failing to stand-up for those who do speak up about the lack of artistic freedoms.

The text's mediations on life being a form of suicide, with our bodies slowly shutting down, killing ourselves over our three score and ten, are readable as a coded critique on those who stand up for what they believe in. Nassim the artist is provoking us to scratch the surface and see that even if we do nothing in the face of brutality then we are still killing ourselves for it - just more slowly. The red-dyed rabbit too, being attacked by its white counterparts is the crowd turning on those willing to make a stand, those brave enough to be different. This struck me as reminiscent of Ibsen's great sign off to The Enemy of the People - "the strongest man in the world is he who stands the most alone."

It is now that we return to the poison in the glass - an action handed back to the performer, suddenly freed from the strictures of the script. They are told to put it down and a member of the audience will take up the mantle, they will become the red rabbit. The new reader arrives and the choice must now be made - which glass to drink from? Which contains the poison? I am told that Chris had an intervention from the audience who threw the contents of both glasses on the floor, Hannah selected one drank and lay down very still until the audience had left; for us, Ildiko decided to pass on the 50/50 coin toss of poison and admirably said she'd have a large glass of wine from the bar. This just goes to show, we are all our red rabbit of protest in our own way.

Don Quijote was at Playworks on Friday 30 May. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit  was at The Peacock  on Sunday 1 June. 

Hatch website