Absurd and creative ecological pastiche.
How will climate change irrevocably effect our lives when it is already here?
Marianne Tuckman, a performance and theatre-maker based across Leeds and Berlin, brings her one-person piece, “The Dirt”, to the Camden People’s Theatre. Part experimental movement piece, part indelible spiral into chaos, “The Dirt” creates an entrancing world through little more than the actor’s body, a ladder and two pineapples.
The piece begins with Tuckman draped across the top of the ladder, before beginning to eerily whisper as she descends the steps. We primarily follow a hapless suburban housewife, looking after her two children who happen to be embodied by two pineapples and trying her best to keep her house in order. We also meet the punk, tasked with the upkeep of the house, but despite the best efforts the place continues to get dirtier and dirtier.
Tuckman’s performance is what anchors the show. An endlessly watchable performer, Tuckman holds the room with an uncanny power. Her lithe ability to switch into the bodies of the macho punk and the unassuming housewife are bold to the point of caricature, instilling these etchings of characters with an enrapturing energy.
So much is achieved in discussing our current and future relationship with the climate crisis with so little mention of it, evoking comparisons to Beckett or Caryl Churchill’s “Far Away” in the way the piece hints towards catastrophe while merely skirting on its edges. The presence of the children, Gustav and the Three-Year-Old, call into question what right we have in birthing children when we cannot even keep our own homes in order, while their personification as fruit only adds to the layers of subtext the play deals with.
“The Dirt” is a deftly woven performance piece that is wholly engaging and ripe for discussion.