A bridge not far enough

10 April 2012

Hilaire Belloc once wrote a song about the problems of shooting a hippopotamus. But he could never have imagined the zookeeper who went out to shoot an elephant to feed her starving family, and came back instead with a pair of flamingo legs to put in the pot.

This ridiculously surreal yet poignant scenario epitomises the tone of the Rejects' Revenge Theatre Company's depiction of a city under siege during civil war. Although the city is overtly fictional, and many of the stories told could sit happily in Dali's imagination, a Greenwich pensioners' sports event, the 1870 Siege of Paris, the 1900 Siege of Ladysmith and the 1992-96 Siege of Sarajevo provide a strong factual basis for everything from the unfortunate flamingo-leg meal to a cricket-match where a team with one-legged members face an opposition where each individual only has one arm.

The appropriately fragmentary set portrays a city ravaged by war. The sorry red brick remnants of one building stand stage right, while a stone basement which now functions as a shelter is placed on the left, underneath the symbolically severed bicycle-bridge of the title.

The director, Xavier Leret, once successfully created a version of the Importance of Being Earnest involving gleefully camp club culture costumes and a cocaine-sniffing aunt. It is therefore unsurprising that comedy becomes his weapon for piercing the armour of a besieged city - so that although a tragic love story underpins the play, it is the satirically cartoon-like characters who imprint themselves on the imagination, whether it is Rachel Essex as Frankie the blatant black-marketeer, or Ann Farrar as the mother vying for elephant burgers.

Despite the commendable adventurousness of the comedy, however, this only really comes together in the black humour and jaunty melodic lines of the songs. More substance is needed for this bicycle-bridge's appealing structure.

The Bicycle Bridge

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