Nightminds
The Electric Company @ Cuckoo Bar
6:30pm, Fri 25 Feb 2011
Do me a favour: go back and read the blurb for Nightminds in your well-worn Fringe Guide.
“When it’s 4am and the city seems so far away. The whole world contracts into your pupils. We become giants. We scream shiny happy fits of rage…”
Now, if that didn’t delight and intrigue you, well… I don’t know what to say. Because those words drew me in like a moth to a flame.
Cuckoo was hot and sticky, and with an audience of fifteen it’s nearly a full house. With a flash of light, we’re off: the six characters of Ego, Lust, Destruction, Romance, Nostalgia, and Failure all working each other over, searching out the kinks. There’s strobe sequences, there’s passages where they surround the audience and shout through us to each other… it all feels very vital, very emotionally intimate, and yet the abstract nature of their dialogue keeps us at arm’s length.
We’re thrown out of Cuckoo at the end of the first act as they rearrange the seating within the space, and when we return… wow. The world of Nightminds has gone to hell, and the emotions have ratcheted up several notches. It’s a very dirty, grimy setting, with a distinctly post-apocalyptic feel, and the desperation in the characters relationships is thick and tangible: the threats, the pleading, the pleading threats. A completely unexpected – and extremely sudden – ending is the icing on the cake.
There’s so much to love about Nightminds; the performances (whilst veering towards the shouty end of the spectrum) were uniformly devoted, the staging and costuming a dirty dystopic triumph, and the discordant music (beginning with a gut-rumbling apocalyptic bang) suitably unsettling throughout. It reminded me a lot of some of the Black Lung pieces of 2007; absolutely committed to the art, and all the more rewarding for it. Bravo!