Review: LA PERFORMANCE, Tron Theatre, Glasgow

La Performance is a piece of visual theatre devised and written by Andy Arnold. Two performers (Emmanuelle Laborit and Ramesh Meyyappan) share a dressing room before a show and tensions begin to build. The piece is wordless and composer/performer Ross Whyte joins the artists onstage as musical accompaniment.

Reading the show blurb after the performance, it's quite clear that I didn't understand the narrative. It's a visually beautiful piece that is lovely to look at but the plot is a little confusing. The actors have a conflict backstage that bleeds into their actions onstage but the details and their motivations get a little hazy.

Laborit and Meyyappan give hypnotic physical performances as they prepare offstage for the theatre. In the dressing room, they take different approaches to their preparation- Meyyappan favouring body warm-ups against Laborit's smoking and vodka-swilling. There are moments of humour but they begin to wear thin over the hour.

La Performance takes inspiration from 1940s French cinema which combines comedy and tragedy. The staging and the physical performances definitely hit the mark but when it comes to storytelling, La Performance didn't quite click for me.

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