Created by Buzzcut Productions

Review by Marina Funcasta

Summerhall – Anatomy Lecture Theatre

Buzzcut Productions combines cameras, puppets, diorama sets and a remarkably peculiar story to create a spellbinding, though uncanny, depiction of rural English suburbia. Emerging from a similar world to Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Tim Burton’s Coraline, this Wonderland is, however, delicately made up of silent fragments and snippets of conversations, recorded on a small moveable camera, of a faceless couple looking after a dog. The idea is genius, but whether the execution sees it to its fullest conception is less certain.

In all honesty, sitting in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre is itself an eerie experience. Looking over into the stage relies on a fishbowl effect, encouraging the audience to oversee what’s going on ‘underneath’ and instead focus on the projections on screen. The work that is performed onstage, therefore, is easy to bypass, looking towards the screen as a more passive consumption of media we all know too well. However, the action downstairs is ultimately unavoidable; flickering between stage left and right, the actors are unafraid to show how meticulous and fast-paced the action ‘behind the scenes’ has to be. Both physically and technologically demanding, this may have been where the show ran most of its risks; the camera through which the show was being recorded live ran into several malfunctions, sacrificing as a result the second layer of their performance.

Nevertheless, this show does what it intends to do in a very original way. Pointing out our subconscious interconnectivity with nature and our surroundings is a difficult task, but Buzzcut Productions achieves it. The layers of performance are useful in this, reminding us of the smaller complexities which go on beneath the surface. The form of the play, therefore, is where I was most impressed. Smaller details within the story are also relevant, in this case; form the smaller, creepier rooms in the house withholding pictures of ‘dog shows’, to the surreptitious nighttime creatures, to the couple themselves; each minute of the show is swelling in detail. To be sure, rooting the story in an event which seems to have begun in 1984 is not at all a surprising coincidence.

Even if the ending feels slightly abrupt and unresolved, the experiential qualities of Bark Bark are truly unlike anything I have seen at Fringe. A very timely play, Buzzcut doesn’t fall short in commenting on the state of our world, and it does so in a particularly intelligent way.

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