Last year while I was waiting around in The Garden of Unearthly Delights for another show to start, three of the talented boys from Gravity & Other Myths wandered past and showed off some of their skills...So this year, when they came back with their show, Freefall, it went straight on my "To See" list.
And it was a very wise decision indeed!
Freefall is an amazing show... funny, skilful, smart, daring and creative.
And all this from a cast whose average age is 19 (the oldest is 29 and the youngest is 16, but all the rest are around 18 or 19). Given how incredibly talented (not to mention strong) they are, I would never have guessed they were all so young.
The central themes of the show are fears, quirks and truth... I'm not sure how many of the truths were really, really true... but they all felt true, which is the main thing. Tilda Cobham-Hervey, the youngest member of the troupe, does a lot of the talking between tricks... and she genuinely has a great sense of comic timing and some quite funny dialogue.
But the real star of this show is the acrobatics!
The way that they leap and throw each other around, not to mention fly through the air on occasion is simply amazing to watch. And my hands are still a little sore from all the clapping we did during the show. In fact I think I can safely say that I clapped more in this show than I think I've clapped in anything we've seen at this year's Fringe.
That's not to say that there isn't a rawness about the show... beyond the cardboard box set and swinging light-bulb props, it's not perfectly polished and flawlessly executed... occasionally tricks don't work right or juggling clubs get dropped, but for me that increased my enjoyment when the trick finally did work... without that sense that things could go wrong, the act wouldn't be half as exciting.
Speaking of exciting... Martin Schreiber in a black Speedo... definitely a bonus!
There were only a couple of minor downsides...
Firstly, the sound system wasn't always that clear, so there were a few pieces of dialogue that we missed... which may tie onto the second downside, which was where we ended up sitting (can't really be helped... I've been in the front row of the theatre twice now, my luck had to run out sometime)... but I picked up a copy of the program which (although slightly pricey for a program) came with a copy of the show on DVD... so I'll look forward to watching this whole thing over again.
But Gravity and Other Myths definitely go down on the "seeing them next time too" list.
Current Mood:
No comments:
Post a Comment