“absurdity of life with tear and joy”
Created by Pierre Guillois and co-written by Agathe L’Huillier and Olivier Martin-Salvan, BIGRE/Fish Bowl, part of MimeLondon 2026, is a love letter from Compagnie le Fils du Grand Réseau to our perpetually exhausting and occasionally absurd contemporary life that, at moments, still sparkles with warmth and tenderness.
Fish Bowl does not follow a straightaway storyline with so-called character stake or arc. Instead, it depicts the daily life of three lodgers living on the top floor of a dilapidated apartment building (design: Laura Léonard). A big guy (Martin-Salvan) is intensely neurotic about hygiene, living in his all whitened lodge suggestive of a near-future smart home in Matrix with a sound- controlled toilet hidden under his bed. His neighbour is a tall, wiry man (Guillois) who loves to enjoy his cupboard food while listening to broadcasts. A pregnant woman (L’Huillier), literally carrying a fish bowl in her hand, moves to the last empty lodge.
The trio clearly have their own unmistaken personalities: the big, germ-phobic guy has a waste chute in his lodge, and hoovers his shoes each time when he gets home. However, this tiny lodge continues to trap him into troubles that brutally shatter his dream of hyper cleanliness. The tall man, a bit artsy and nerdy, seems to be the most unassuming among the three, self-contained to his tiny space. The woman, on the other hand, pursues a very conventional middle-class lifestyle obsessed with quality, only to find it collapse not only just because of the shabbiness of her tiny lodge, but also because of the fragile and ultimately unfulfillable promise on that lifestyle.
To some extent, Fish Bowl feels like a mixture of Black Books and Knallerfrauen. In a way, its humour is sharp and critical: those paper-thin walls continue to cause fuss. Tall guy’s cupboard food can easily travel to the big guy, and the big guy’s wig may fly into his neighbour’s soup bowl through his skylight window on a super windy day. This physical precarity sets a sharp contrast to their aspirations, whether it is techno-utopian, hippie-esque or cheesy middle-class, layering bare the absurdity of life.
Of course, Fish Bowl does not collapses into cynical nullity. It remains a current of romantic gentleness where humanity and friendship still sparkle as solid and true. After a “mock” curtain call, there is one last ever laugh-out-loud but heartfelt moment, subtly foreshadowed throughout the show and eventually materialised. With the recurring soundtrack “Happy Together” (Sound Design: Roland Auffret and Loïc Le Cadre), *Fish Bowl* ultimately leaves the message that happiness per se is something already bittersweet.