A woman flails around in her hospital bedroom as if operated on strings by a huge blue man in an overcoat, himself a disquieting looking papier-mâché puppet. Her face is covered in blue paint as the score crescendos in atonal noises, sounding a bit like a music box being pulled apart. We are watching experimental, highly physical, and enthralling theatre.
Devised by Anglo-French company Theatre Temoin, The Fantasist tracks its protagonist’s descent into bipolar disorder, and the fevered mood swings she experiences in her room. Julia Yevnine, Catherine Gerrard, and Julia Corrêa deliver fantastic interconnecting performances as they animate a series of nightmarish puppets tracking a descent into mental instability. As the patient tries to paint in her room, she is visited by a mysterious, charming male, two disembodied heads warning her away from him, a painstakingly animated miniature and a vicious ghoul. The craftsmanship of the puppets and the specificity used in bringing them to life with their own personal idiosyncrasies is superb. Julia Yevnine gives an incredible performance as the heroine plagued by these creatures – her happy moments always laced with an air of desperation, her moments of depression tinged with hope. All three of them possess a razor-sharp sense of timing and a fluid movement that gives the play a ferocious pace and sense of urgency, ably assisted by the unsettling original score.
The hour is a touching and unflinchingly dark piece, with an ambiguous and disturbing ending. The company is always at its best in the wordless sequences; depicting such levels of mental imbalance in stage dialogue was at times stilted, and broke the intense atmosphere created by their movements. However, this doesn’t detract from what is a bold, stark and restlessly inventive show.
