Low Down

The life tableau of a woman who has stepped over the threshold of life is portrayed by an emsemble cast in a life-affirming, but never too sentimental tale of time-lines and what we do with the time we have.

Review

A woman beyond a hundred years, in the realm after death, stands before us smiling, back in the body she occupied as a younger woman, a time when she was at her physical best. Life is both a timeline and a tableau, a realm that Dante describes a place where "time becomes space", a tapestry of moments, both sequential and concurrent. Past, present and future melt together in this captivating creation from a young cast who take ownership of every inch of the stage.

A central image of how we are all connected, sometimes disconnected, of how our "things" hang from the moments of sequential time, yet how also our connections are timeless, perhaps even eternal, is employed through the use of well choreogrpahed movement and plenty of string. I won't tell you how Before We Remember ends so as not to spoil the breathtaking beauty of it.

There is as much visual art here as performance as the company use black plastic bags to create animals, clothes and even set.  The pacing is well crafted and the style often feels cinematic, an approach that Gomito use in several of their productions.

This is ensemble storytelling that ranges the plains of emiotion, mood and tempo. I haven't seen such simple inventiveness in a long while. The puppetry is a clever, carefully done and impressive.

The piece is sometimes so full of happening,  sound and image that it threatens to pitch into confusion, and sometimes the physical movement among the cast is not consistently done - some are very expressionist and almost acrobatic, others are restrained and perhaps lacking in the mobility of the others. If this is by design, the inconsistency doesn't always serve overall coherence. However, that is a minor quibble in a performance that deserves to be seen, savoured.

Gomito have created a beautiful and deeply satisfying piece of theatre

Reviewed by PL 2nd August 2008

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Gomito Productions