PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Brewery, Bristol (Tue 4-Sat 22 Oct)

THEATRE Dennis is pathologically afraid of flies. He has painted the windows of his flat shut, he covers his toilet with cling film, and he is plagued by nightmarish daydreams of making snow-angels in Antarctica, accompanied by a penguin and a polar bear (two animals that, he is well aware, live on opposite ends of the globe to each other). He has lost his job. His girlfriend has left him. He never has guests.

In this new work by Pins and Needles Productions (a.k.a. Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduates Emma Earle and Zoe Squire), we are introduced to the simultaneously unnerving and ludicrous world of phobia, and how – if left unchecked – it bulges and swells out of proportion until it has taken over every last corner of the phobic’s life, rendering it unrecognisable. Oliver Lansley's script is informed by an eclectic choice of cultural references, ranging from 80s cult sci-fi classic ‘The Fly’, via the Old Testament Book of Exodus through to the nursery rhyme of the lady who swallowed a fly. By making the audience aware of the proliferation in the western culture of an otherwise negligible life form, the play gains an eerie undercurrent: how come the fly creeps up on us time and again, we wonder, shifting uncomfortably in our seats, and how come we’d never noticed before?

‘Flies’ is largely made up of consecutive monologues by Dennis, his incompetent therapist, Dr Rickman, and (ulp) The Fly. The monologues are interspersed with short exchanges between Dennis and a handful of characters of varying grotesqueness – a maniacally friendly old lady on a plane, a travel agent, and Dennis’s old boss to name but a few. There is some fine character acting by Paul Mundell, who gives a hilariously suave performance of The Fly – a necessary element in balancing out the audience sympathies. Oliver Hollis gives a supremely energetic performance as the anguished Dennis, enabling the play's inherent schadenfreude to come through in a hilarious yet pitiful way.

Zoe Squire's set is both disquieting and visually playful: made up of defunct materials such as VCR tapes and gutted old-style TV-sets, it forms the perfect background for the ramblings of a dithering phobic slipping into an increasingly warped sense of reality. The creative pizzazz of the production is rounded off by Kid Carpet’s live performance of music and sound effects (ranging from slurping a drink through a straw to the rewinding of a tape), which is seamlessly incorporated into the main action and punctuates the goings-on with ingenuity and humorous flair (in case you've ever wondered, a sheep goes ‘baa-aa-aah’, a dog goes ‘woof!’, and a llama goes ‘llama’).

Perhaps the reasons behind Dennis’s phobia could have been delved into a bit further; still, the description of the recurring dream sequence, culminating in the fly with patched-up wings, reveals a genuinely touching dimension to his phobia and goes some way toward giving the play the necessary weight. The varying elements of the production, stage design, music and sound effects, and the precise, poetic script come together in an intelligent, laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking performance. Unmissable. (Regina Papachlimitzou)

Copyright Regina Papachlimitzou 2011

Picture: Zoe Squire