Fin [FringeTIX]
Mere Mortals Theatre @ The Tuxedo Cat – Green Room
8:30pm, Sat 19 Feb 2011
The stage is a city of tin cans, large and small – spectacular and shiny and impersonal. The titular Fin arrives, a tin-can head upon a water-filled latex glove body, and proceeds to wander the city, engaging its many inhabitants and… well, it gets a bit sad.
But for all the concentration on the performers’ faces, some of the puppetry… well, it isn’t convincing.
The syringe mosquito is a classic example: the performer is completely focussed as the creature flits around, but the creature itself? Anonymous, inert. A mere object in the hand of its master, incapable of imparting any kind of expression. The barely-controlled jiggling of the tampon mice, the accidental tipping of items from the stage, and the eventual trashing of the city were other aspects that seemed cold, passionless, and even pointless.
Fin is the only exception to this rule; his two bolt eyes on his tin-can head are remarkably expressive, coupled with the clacking of his mouth, and the way the performers walk his latex-glove body around is sometimes really neat. He really is the star of the show, and when his doppelgänger arrives there’s some quite emotive moments; they manage to conjure a certain sensuality out of the sex scene, there’s an element of terror (and dampness, for the front row) to the chomping and slicing murder of the doppelgänger, and Fin’s eventual death (via a dye injection into his rubbery body from one of the syringe mosquitos) is really quite poignant.
But these moments are all-too-few, and very far between. There’s clearly some wonderful ideas present in Fin – Gina Moss and Sabrina D’Angelo have found some clever uses for everyday items, and created some creatures out of them. It just feels like they didn’t refine the ideas enough: some elements, like the condom snake, had so much promise, with their curious noise and visual texture all providing heaps of inspiration… but then the snake dies without fanfare, and the whole experience just feels underdeveloped.
As a result, too much of the performance just felt like two girls pissfarting around in their own world, oblivious to the audience that had – perhaps – expected a puppet show with coherent narrative and expression. Which is a shame, because – as I mentioned earlier – there are some really interesting ideas in there. I just felt like I was watching a living workshop for the show, and not the show itself.