Golem, Young Vic, theatre review: Dazzling
The deadpan script is joyous
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Your support makes all the difference.You won't find funnier or more dazzlingly synchronised interaction between live performance and a crazily satiric animated world than in Golem, the latest piece by the 1927 company.
Five actors, two of whom double as musicians, and a screen swarming with droll, cartoonish imagery summon up a wittily unsettling variant of the Jewish Golem myth that here taps into our modern anxiety that our lives are hostage to faceless corporations and technology that appears to be obeying our desires while in fact controlling them.
The Golem starts off here as the traditional clay man but becomes monstrous not by looming rebellion by upgrading as an evermore miniaturised gizmo hunt, the seemingly perfect help-meet who insidiously enslaves its owner body and soul.
All clipped 1920s accent and permanently sullen pout, Shamira Turner is splendid as the Golem's owner, the geeky Robert who “smells faintly of unwashed hair and mathematics” – the joyously deadpan script and extraordinarily precise direction are by Suzanne Andrade.
Paul Barritt's animations are mischievously referential tour de force and how could one dislike a show with a punk band “Annie and the Underdogs” who grimly rehearse “music to ruin your Christmas” but can't perform in public through “nervous embarrassment”?
To January 31, 2015; 020 7922 2922
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