Dimanche, a family-friendly performance, kept even the very youngest children in the audience silent for eighty minutes. That tells you everything that you need to know about the captivating quality of this production. This wonderfully innovative work is written, directed, and performed by Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux, and Sandrine Heyraud using a wide range of techniques and technologies. It is an expansion of an earlier award-winning 2018 production, Backup, that only covered the Arctic scenes. Dimanche is French for Sunday, which, perhaps, suggests that the new scenes, in a family's home, are on Sundays, when the family is enjoying the day of rest.
It begins at 4am at the north pole where three people are documenting changes caused by climate change. Suddenly, the ice creaks, groans, and cracks, sounds that are signalling the impending melting. A polar bear and her cub are stranded on a small ice floe that is gradually breaking up. A family, trying to maintain a normal life in their house, are suffering extremes of temperature and, later, high winds and flooding. There is a tornado, a tsunami, and sea levels rise, all taking place on a relatively small stage area.
Put that way, as a simple list of the main points, it might not sound like much, but how all that is brought to life is stupendous. There are miniature landscapes and tiny vehicles, larger model vehicles, people becoming scenery, miming travelling in the vehicle to the rhythm of Paul Simon's 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, simultaneously hilariously creating the impression of being the vehicle itself with the aid of a few props, life-size puppets of a little old granny, a polar bear and cub, and a migratory Arctic goose, miming the effects of climate extremes within the house, projected videos, black light puppetry, and it goes on, and on.
It is not entirely carried out by the three actors, of course, because there was a huge team behind the creation of the piece and, in performance, there are unseen others working to help to create the myriad effects onstage. Guillaume Toussaint Fromentin's lighting and Brice Cannavo's sound, also have vital, totally integrated roles to play.
There is humour, black comedy, moments of poignancy, and tragic instances in these numerous, seemingly disconnected scenes that, gradually, reveal their connections to each other, amplifying the theme of the danger posed by climate change. At the end, there is a hint of a reference to the film, Waterworld, as a lone person in a kayak, on which is mounted a video camera, drifts aimlessly around, scooping up items that might be either of value, or of use, from the greatly expanded ocean.
To go into further detail would be to spoil it for future audiences, so book tickets for the whole family and go to see this quite magical and extremely timely and relevant production while you can.
Photography, Alice Piemme
Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Sunday 1st March 2020.