A Brief Review of A Strange Wild Song (Nlog Day One).

I have been volunteering for the Leicester Arts and Museums Service for a few months in my spare time. I was emailed a few days ago by the volunteer coordinator about getting some free tickets to a play called 'A Strange Wild Song'.
The play was written and performed by a group called the Rhum and Clay Theatre Company and had performed the whole one- hour- ish show at the Edinburugh Festival Fringe in 2012 and now had brought it to Leicester.

The play tells the story of a Belgian photographer named Leon Gimpel who befriended a group of children living in the Grenata Street neighbourhood in Paris, forming their own play army. He visited the children, regularly playing war with them, recording these meetings through the pictures that he took from his camera.

Here is a quote from the program,

"Ultimately A Strange Wild Song is a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit, and to those who can find light in the darkest of places."

Sounded like it was right up my street.

I was not sure what to expect. In my mind, I imagined a small theatre but when I got to the place, I saw that it was just one small room. We sat down on the seats prepared for us, which were no more than fifteen places  in number. A young woman at the side of the room was playing an accordion, not playing a tune at all, but instead playing random, unrelated notes... which certainly set the atmosphere and made you slightly uncomfortable.
Half of the room had been arranged into the performance area which was set out to look like ruins, only about three props altogether but you still got the idea.

Four actors took part in the play, each playing two characters each. There was a continual shift between two time periods. The first time period was during the war and the character, Leon Gimpel, meeting the children in the ruins and befriending them. The second time period was set in modern times when a descendant of Gimpel meets up with a group of historians and scientists who have discovered the camera that was used to take pictures of the events in the first time period.

The whole show was very slick and even made use of mime and props to physically show what was going on in the children's imagination. One of my favorite parts was the use of puppets to show the child's imaginative journey flying through the skies in the spitfire, fighting German planes.

It was pretty brilliant. I think that the intimate surroundings benefited the show. You certainly felt like you were part of the story and because you were so close to the actors, it made things seem more real.

I have written down the details of the company below if you wish to look at them.



www.rhumandclay.com
Facebook: Rhum and Clay Theatre Company.
Twitter: @Rhumandclay

Over and Out.
ED.