Review: DIMANCHE, Peacock Theatre

Three years in the making, Dimanche comes to London as part of MimeLondon 2025 and tackles the climate crisis with savage mockery and tender tragedy using life-size puppets, exquisite clowning and heartfelt writing.

The action comes in the form of a doom-laden triptych. A trio of wildlife reporters jump into a van, pump up the radio and take a juddering journey to document the effects of the ecological crisis. Three animals are seen dealing with the environmental changes around them. In a family home, three adults do their very best to remain oblivious to the increasingly extreme weather around them.

A collaboration between Belgian companies Company Chaliwaté and Focus, this majestic meditation stands in contrast to Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson's play Kyoto (currently on at Sohoplace), another superb drama that seeks to excoriate humanity’s role in the greatest existential threat it has faced. While the latter is a high-tempo, high-volume chamber piece, Dimanche takes us on a global journey to examine the ecological disaster rumbling beneath the seawaves, in the cities and over our heads. 

While the journalists have a fraught time filming in a desolate landscape, the causes of climate change and its effect on both people and animals are seen elsewhere. Inside a kitchen, a husband and wife prepare dinner while in the next room an elderly woman (realised with great humour and detail through a puppet) travels down a stairlift to the lounge. The signs of excessive energy use are everywhere: Granny doesn’t really need the stairlift but takes it anyway to come down and listen to some music and multiple fans are seen overhead and on chairs simultaneously blasting away. On one side of the kitchen table is a pot of tea and a moka coffee machine, a symbolic nod perhaps to a consumerist society that wants its cake and would rather like to eat it too.

As the weather wreaks havoc, these adults work harder to cope without necessarily doing anything to tackle the problem at source and the consequences are realised in surreal fashion. In oppressive heat, the husband walks around sweaty and bare-chested as, all around him and his wife, the wooden furniture warps out of shape, the arms of the ceiling fan flop down and Granny’s vinyl record bends around her hands like a Dali clock. In a later episode, a hurricane rips through the house just after dinner has been prepared. What starts as a mild case of horizontal hair eventually sees the stairlift shoot off upwards while the family are flung into the air and desperately cling on for dear life to whatever they can grab.

Meanwhile, on an ever-shrinking ice floe, a polar bear hunkers down and scans an uncertain horizon while its pup scampers around, climbing up and over its parent. Again brought to life through some fluent and innovative puppetry, the shuffling ursine and its playful offspring lift the heart just before their fate breaks it. There’s no dark humour to this episode; in the blink of an eye, we go from seeing something incredibly cute to experiencing bleak horror in a sudden mood shift which is as ruthless as it is effective.

The ending brings all these strands together. After strapping on an oxygen tank, a diver looks up just as they are swept away by a tsunami and the ultimate theatrical sanction - a complete blackout - stuns us into silence. We emerge into an underwater world where curious fish swim this way and that before being chased off by a shark. A lifeless body slowly floats past and, in a fitting finale, two timepieces make their appearance. The first is an alarm clock which rings loudly in an unsubtle metaphor, a wake-up call to a civilisation sleepwalking straight towards its own demise. Right after, the wall clock seen in the kitchen comes into view and there’s an ominous ticking noise - but is the clock this time counting up or down?

The title evokes the series of Sundays across which the plot rolls out and the day itself - traditionally a day of rest before starting work - is symbolic of society’s relatively relaxed demeanour as climate change targets are reduced or pushed back to the next decade. The whip smart writing makes clear that there is a wide gap between awareness and action and, while it doesn’t force the point with quite the same venomous intent as Kyoto, it leaves us in no doubt that the challenges are real and unavoidable. 

This much-travelled work is the product of a year of writing and two more of devising. It has already been seen in Sydney, New York and at the Edinburgh International Festival and, despite its downbeat themes and its unusual provenance, there’s another much-anticipated collaboration on the way. Whether it will match this show in terms of cleverness and impact, we’ll be front and centre when it comes to London.

More information on MimeLondon can be found here.

Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic

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