Forget chicken supreme, this is Clout supreme!
In this latest show from international London and Istanbul based ensemble, these masters of the absurd take on the topic of our relationship with food with a full menu from breakfast through lunch to dinner.
In Zoo Sanctuary, there is a sense of observing from slightly above like it would have been in an ancient amphitheatre and the sight that greets is like watching participants in the kind of extreme Japanese TV show Clive James used to show. With shrill uncomfortable sounds piercing the dark space, three near naked bodies lie on a dirt covered floor. Tethered to enamel basins, they are capped and bandaged like big zombie babies.
They move through a filth of excess at times as if incapacitated becoming mesmerised by a virtual table setting. Things degenerate to a debauched mess and cornflakes raining from heaven is reminiscent of the Beatles’ song Come and Get it in the film The Magic Christian though the mess here is of pre- digested food!
This is cannibalistic and animalistic shifting from the extremes of ancient martyrs like a stuffed and sizzling St Sebastian to endoscopes showing the body’s food routes. In a mix of old and new, and with the use of dental mouth pieces there is some clinical expulsion like a modern vomitorium and some orgasmic reactions to a groaning table that’s accessed with manual gluttony and suffice to say that what has till now been an innocent sliced melon has now a completely new association!
To all this the trio that is Jennifer Swingler, Sacha Plaige and George Ramsay bring all their Ecole Jacques Lecoq training with refined or monstrous mannerisms and some brilliant comic clowning terrifically exemplified in the effete pasta duel. Clout has taken their considerable skills to extremes of grotesquery that at times make an extremely uncomfortable watch as they point up our weird relationship with our basic requirement from shortage to glut; from indulgence to deprivation, either self or imposed.
Ending with the messy Grow Fins from Captain Beefheart, Clout serves up a deliciously macabre spectacle.
7th-31st August (not 21) at 15.55 age recommend 14+