Theatre review: Dean Gibbons and the Knowledge of Death

Published on Monday 24 May 2010 20:15

DEAN GIBBONS AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF DEATH ** THE ARCHES, GLASGOW

ON THE strength of this two-hander, shown as part of the Arches' Behaviour season, Brighton's Inconvenient Spoof is a company with the means to say something, but nothing apparent to say.

In technical terms, Dean Gibbons and the Knowledge of Death is a small-scale show with large-scale ambitions. In the space of an hour it makes use of several types of puppet, back-projections, the overlaying of live and pre-recorded images, as well as lecture-style direct audience address and physical theatre techniques.

It's the kind of sophisticated blend of the human and the technological you'd expect in a Robert Lepage production and yet all done on a studio scale. But to what purpose?

The sub-Scooby-Doo story told by Matt Rudkin and Silvia Mercuriali, better known for their work with the interactive theatre company Rotozaza, is about a sinister organisation with a Eugenics-style scheme to turn an over-populated world into a better place for fewer people. This convoluted narrative creaks forward in parallel to a lecture about evolution, enlivened by Rudkin's cod German accent and Mercuriali's impression of a domesticated gorilla – as accurate as it is irritating.

They get a lot of gosh-aren't-we-bonkers laughs, but even though the scientifically accurate material alludes to hot topics such as peak oil production and climate change, it serves no purpose except to give Mercuriali the chance to show off her anthropomorphic skills and to justify the silly apocalyptic story.

For all their mixed-media inventiveness and willingness to say something clever, their show comes across as trite and self-indulgent.