Review: TRASH!,Peacock Theatre

If ever a show was deserving of an exclamation mark, it is the crash-bang-bang-bang-wallop Trash!

Set in a garbage recycling centre, we meet a gang of four workers (played by Bruno Alves, Harold Gazeau, Gorka González and Fran Mark) whose job is to work their way through whatever comes into the place and transform it using the power of sound. Specifically, the sound of something being smacked very hard against something else.

This collaboration between theatre company Yllana and percussionists ToomPak (both from Spain) does have some deviations from this general approach but not many. The workmen bounce up out of dustbins while inside black bin liners and rustle away loudly to create a bouncy musical piece. Once they’re free of their plastic prison, they amuse themselves with a choir of umbrellas opening and closing. From there on, though, it’s very much all about the bang-bang-bang.

That’s not to say that we end up in some kind of dull percussive death-spiral. There’s imagination aplenty when it comes to what gets banged and how: propane tanks become  bongo drums, basketballs are bounced with increasing vigour around the stage and toolboxes are loudly clank-clank-clanked together. And that’s all before the quartet start smacking big empty plastic bottles off each other’s orange hard hats.

The humour is molto commedia dell’arte but also highly reminiscent of two long-running West End and Broadway phenomenons. The music and the ingenious variety of found instruments in Trash! are not a million miles from the “junkpercussion” seen and heard in Stomp while the charmingly silly antics and the female robo-voice that pops up every now are all Blue Man Group motifs. 

Those searching for a plot will need to look very hard and all the storytelling is there as an excuse for ever more boisterous clanging. This cuts both ways: on the one hand, it makes for a more fluid and energetic show as we skip from one scene to the next, our experience lubricated by a minimum of exposition and dialogue, but it also means that the worthy eco-messaging is too thin and too sparse to cut through the clowning. A chance to educate the many youngsters in the audience and have them avoid the mistakes of their parents’ generation has been missed.

Considering both Stomp and The Blue Man Group had long runs of around three decades each in New York and only finished their residences recently (the latter only shutting up shop on February 5), Broadway may well be a fertile ground for a show which definitely offers plenty of bang for your buck.

Trash! continues until 1 March.

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