Flor de obsessão – St. Brides
THE HERALD
MARY BRENNAN
GLOOM, and na unsettling mood of malaise seeps on stage – exotic, acrid, like holy incense and sweaty sex.
This is not the mood, the territory, we usually associate with puppets – but the highly-gifted and imaginative Pia Fraus company from Brazil use their extraordinary puppets to explore the erotic fantasies an obsessions that humanity prefers to keep hidden.
Culling dark and graphic images from the controversial writings of Nelson Rodriguez, the three men slip themselves, and their cunningly elaborate puppets, in and out of shadowy encounters with sex, religion, and death.
Masks, torsos are animated one moment – discarded like husks the next. A man is suddenly dangling aloft, himself a puppet, his body – his orifices – open to the avid, probing attentions of little figures reveling the role reversal.
And yet, bit by bit, everything returns to the closet or is swept under the table – our three men end as the started, formally normal with all the deviant urges and compulsions out of sight.
Very, very, strange but brilliant in its wayward inspiration.