"Show me your balls!"
Scrunched up paper balls instead of tickets – how novel
Form at the Performance Gym Winchester University
Rendered Retina are a company of graduates from the University of Winchester who are making waves with their innovative theatre performances Timon of Athens and Form which led them to win the LET award for 2017 and gain funding from Arts Council England. This performance of Form was the company’s first public showing of the piece before taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year and it was a wonderful display of creativity through use of space, movement and comedy. The play began with the three performers in an office, dressed in suits methodically working around each other to answer phones, staple paper and stamp forms.
One of the men began distracting the others by pretending to use stairs behind a stack of boxes which turned into an escalator; a brilliant opening gag that set up the rest of the play perfectly as a light hearted, brilliantly timed piece. The stacked boxes were full of scrunched paper balls which were emptied throughout the play to replicate sand, the ocean and snow as the three characters escaped their mundane office environment.
At one point during Rendered Retina’s performance a see-through sheet was lifted with a character behind accompanied by blue and green lights to highlight the shadows of his body which created a surreal underwater scene; a chance for the company to display their more sober side using their bodies to contort and dance with each other. The drowning man became metaphorical of being lost in piles of work, choked behind plastic - the falsity, synthetic quality of contemporary work environments.
The performance felt inspired by Gecko Theatre Company’s recent production Institution that I was fortunate to see at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton; it also dealt with men in the workplace using similar creative techniques such as a stage framed by filing cabinets that served as doors, screens, phone boxes and more.
Rendered Retina performed as a guest company at Winchester Theatre Royal’s Scratch Shakespeare event in March this year; as winners of the 2015 Scratch they were welcomed with hearty applause, and their performance of the little known Shakespeare play Timon of Athens was incredibly witty with songs, hats and visual gags galore. This performance of Form felt like a new, creative and more sophisticated play to suit the company’s maturity and expansion and I wish them all the best at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year!