No doubt that technology can offer new experiences to theater goers as did "Stifter´s Thing" by Heiner Goebbels but it can also brake the atmosphere created by actors into thousand peaces just with one camera not working on the right time. The latter happened with otherwise funny and gripping "Tip of the Tongue" by PLASMA.
In the beginning, there are four men in black suits walking from one of the five white lecterns to another, taking a zip of water from the glasses on them or pinching their left ear with the right hand. This goes on for a while when suddenly a small robot drives on stage with a sign attached to it: Do not worry, there is nothing to understand. The audience laughs dubiously and is left in that mode of response till the end of the performance.
We have all once in a while felt that a word is on the tip of the tongue but it just won´t become audible and that is exactly what those four men, now without jackets, explain to the audience, using all the vocabulary of neuroscience. But it is not in the mostly ununderstandable words where the beauty of the performance lays but in the way those scientific arguments are performed - shifting from one character to another, using repeating lines and movements well known as the device of the theater of the absurd and having love songs from a Finnsih variety show as a refrain.
What does it all mean? That question was barricaded by a small robot with a sign in the beginning and as the end is approaching, the little helper is once more on the stage, now with a camera on it, driving from one man to another but showing no image on the wide screen. And as easily as audience went along with actors´ pure joy of playing, indifferent to exact meaning, it now sits impatiently and feeling betrayed that a perfect night in the theater is taken from them. Fortunately actors still have enough scenes left to win the audience back and people leaving the theater are happy and smiling and perhaps some even know now why sometimes words get stuck on the tip of the tongue but for the guys of PLASMA that does not seem to matter since words, any words, are just means for creating comic characters and situations. And why not?
In the beginning, there are four men in black suits walking from one of the five white lecterns to another, taking a zip of water from the glasses on them or pinching their left ear with the right hand. This goes on for a while when suddenly a small robot drives on stage with a sign attached to it: Do not worry, there is nothing to understand. The audience laughs dubiously and is left in that mode of response till the end of the performance.
We have all once in a while felt that a word is on the tip of the tongue but it just won´t become audible and that is exactly what those four men, now without jackets, explain to the audience, using all the vocabulary of neuroscience. But it is not in the mostly ununderstandable words where the beauty of the performance lays but in the way those scientific arguments are performed - shifting from one character to another, using repeating lines and movements well known as the device of the theater of the absurd and having love songs from a Finnsih variety show as a refrain.
What does it all mean? That question was barricaded by a small robot with a sign in the beginning and as the end is approaching, the little helper is once more on the stage, now with a camera on it, driving from one man to another but showing no image on the wide screen. And as easily as audience went along with actors´ pure joy of playing, indifferent to exact meaning, it now sits impatiently and feeling betrayed that a perfect night in the theater is taken from them. Fortunately actors still have enough scenes left to win the audience back and people leaving the theater are happy and smiling and perhaps some even know now why sometimes words get stuck on the tip of the tongue but for the guys of PLASMA that does not seem to matter since words, any words, are just means for creating comic characters and situations. And why not?
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