Theatre review: Enough Already, Glasgow

INCORPORATING music, theatre and film, Enough Already explores the yearning for utopia and challenges the idea of useful ideologies.

Enough Already: Dream-like blend of action and stop-motion collage

Enough Already - Tramway, Glasgow

* * * *

Written and animated by French polymath François Sarhan, the piece places great demands on all, from foley artists Julien Baissat and Céline Bernard, who must supply diegetic noise onstage for more than 90 minutes; Scottish ensemble Red Note, who sing and narrate while continuing to play their instruments; and performer Claudio Stellato, who portrays the sad-eyed Bobok, a naïve and fanatical individual likened to “Jacques Tati with a vengeance”.

Confounded by reality, Bobok is inspired by the absurd encyclopaedia of one Professor Glaçon, whose imaginative treatise is rendered in Terry Gilliam-like, cut and paste imagery, flashing across a giant screen after Bobok leaves his home and the stage, to reconstitute the city around him as the book dictates.

There is a love story and mentoring relationship of sorts with Magda (Magdalena Steinlein) and literal banker-bashing. But Bobok’s fundamentalist acts are so surreal and so comical, that his bomb-planting retains a Tati-like wonder and innocence, even as his programme of destruction recalls the anarchic aesthetics of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The dream-like blend of action and stop-motion collage is deceptively slick and the creative talents involved integrate seamlessly, even when Bobok, amusingly, grows aware of the foley artists making his every sound.