Theatre Review: Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre

SHARMANKA KINETIC THEATRE: WHEELS OF LIFE *****THEATRE WORKSHOP, EDINBURGH

YOU can see why Arts Council bean-counters have difficulty with the creations of Eduard Bersudsky, the Glasgow-based Russian mechnical genius behind Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre (at Theatre Workshop until 30 August). Is it theatre, visual art, puppetry or a seance in a scrapyard, you wonder, as this "mechanical ballet for 15 machines", still and shrouded in stage fog as you enter the theatre, stirs into eccentric, whirring and clanging life.

Old sewing machines, bicycle wheels and obscure Victorian gadgets combine with animal skulls and Bersudsky's deftly carved figures – droll, bawdy, grotesque, pathetic – so each "kinemat" becomes a spinning, clattering predestined universe of its own, peopled by animals, people or demons, the sleight of hand enhanced by lighting and fragmented music.

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You could be glib and describe it as Hieronymus Bosch meets Heath Robinson, but what goes unseen and unheard but is very tangible, is the burden of centuries of history and human pain informing these marvellous creations.

Aficionados of Sharmanka's Glasgow gallery will recognise some old favourites – the ghastly, death's-headed Master and Margerita with its orbiting figures, the droll bickering between a lugubrious voiced Nickodym and its wheedling, bird-like familiar, and the Titanic, with its cavorting, top-hatted crew – ship of fools or handcart to Hell?

More recent pieces include the marvellously sardonic Secret Life of Artists, in which a spinning procession of painters such as Dali, Lautrec and Da Vinci is cranked by Death himself while below him a gargoyle-like figure – presumably the archetypal suffering artist – gets it in the neck; or the delicately framed Singer Tower, inhabited by industrious animals. Never has the Singer sewing machine been so surreally deployed.