News

Poor Thing

Gareth K Vile

John Dowland’s songs evoke an early modern melancholy that matches dark romanticism with elegant melodies: VOX Muziektheater’s Poor Thing trawls through the belongings of a deceased person, presenting them in a tableau that is, by turns, surreal, funny and emotive. Dowland’s music offers an appropriately mournful atmosphere, while Linde Schinke and Martine van Ditzhuyzen play with the objects, trying to forge a biography from trinkets. Although Poor Thing is preoccupied with death, the company discover humour in the absurd juxtaposition of ideas and objects, before poignantly evoking an obituary of a life that is, ultimately, unknown and unknowable.

The warm relationships between the three performers - Punto Bawono provides the lute soundtrack and witty interjections – bathes the production in a empathetic kindness. Conceived as a way of remembering and celebrating the departed, its fascination with the apparently random collection of objects manages to capture a sense of the character behind it. They imagine love and passion, sentimental adventures, moments of disappointment, infusing the show with an aesthetic that sometimes recalls the legendary Chuckle Brothers: the desire to present ‘high art’ with early modern music and operatic singing is frequently grounded by intrusions of physical theatre, pratfalls and slapstick.

Beginning and ending with the reminder, in Latin, that all is vanity, Poor Thing is a modern momento mori, placing object theatre in its most literal sense at the service of the spiritual. The parts of life that are intangible, and move beyond the symbolism provided by objects, are ghostly and mysterious: as Schinke and van Ditzhuyzen reassemble the collection, or pack it away, they only emphasise the emptiness at the heart of the process. The erasure caused by death is present, even as the person disappears behind their owned things