Take a chance on me!

Samantha Ellis10 April 2012

It is fun to mislead the audience, to make them think we have gone too far," says Fran Waller Zepper, with a twinkle in her eye.

She's well placed to get her kicks as part of Dutch theatre company De Gebroeders Flint; she and her partner-in-crime Felix Strategier are veterans of the toughest kind of theatre - high-risk acrobatics, street shows and mime. She has worked with top-notch mime groups, including London's The People Show, while he has worked in musical theatre and still plays a mean ocarina.

They appear exactly as you'd expect theatrical old-timers to look: louche, dishevelled and slightly raffish. Fran arrives for the interview in a black velvet trouser suit and a battered cloche hat wound round with brocade and ribbon; Felix has a worn, slightly shiny tuxedo jacket on over his sweater and cords.

They set up De Gebroeders Flint (the name means "the brothers Flint" but there are no brothers Flint) 20 years ago and there has been no shortage of risk-taking since; they giggle as they describe a street auction they held for a statue of the Virgin Mary that ended when they broke a chair over an innocent bystander's head. They only revealed that he was one of the company when the audience was in uproar.

"We always try to break the barrier between the artist and the audience," says Felix. But sometimes the breakage comes dangerously close to being literal; he once played the part of a street drunk so successfully that people started threatening to smash his head in.

In their current show Bingo! they conjure up an old-fashioned bingo palace where the audience compete with real money for real prizes. And even if - like me - your only experience of bingo is playing housey-housey for chocolate coins, you can't help getting competitive.

Bingo! brings out the granny in everyone, and when I watched it in Amsterdam I found myself lining up cards to increase my chances of winning the freakishly kitsch prizes: blow-up breasts, a green inflatable crocodile, a card caddy set and a toy basset hound with the most mournful gaze you ever saw. Felix, oozing oily charm as the Italian impresario Riccardo, was not too proud to trumpet the virtues of the prizes he had tracked down for us to win.

"I have imported from Russia real icons," he said, also pointing out that his yellow shoes were made "from a real plastic snake".

Reality of the more conventional kind is in short supply at Bingo! Their bingo palace is pure absurdism, a hyperreal establishment staffed by a motley crew of charlatans from all over the world.

Felix's Riccardo insists, with more and more desperation, "I am absolutely sure that tonight you are going to become much more happy than you are now", while Fran wears her hair in a fearsome spike ("plenty of talcum powder and water") to play Riccardo's wife, the glacial Anna Feoderovna.

In a sour, ratchety voice she calls out the numbers, eschewing the usual catch-phrases to deliver her own inimitable slant on life: "Eighteen! Difficult age for a girl! Forty-five! Age of a woman's menopause! Fifty-nine! Then the toy breaks or the mother dies!"

The rest of the staff provide constant distractions. Fatima, Gerda Van Der Veen's Turkish mamma, swats flies, Zicko, Sabri Saad El-Hamus's Egyptian with greasy hair and smile, tries to convince me to part with my telephone number and clothing; when I demur, he twangs my bra-strap and moves on to another victim.

Then a sharp-suited Mafia man bursts in, demanding money from the hapless Riccardo, who ominously disappears, along with his wife. We are left in the hands of Zicko who tries to spice things up with a bit of erotic dancing, vainly repeating "Are we happy, or are we happy?" as the multinational, multilingual cast can no longer understand each other's threats and promises and the game dissolves into Babel-like chaos.

But with all the game-playing and jokes on the nature of reality, this show unerringly hits home. Maybe it's because there is not a shred of irony in the performances, and the almost Stanislavskian realism extends to all the actors bar Felix and Fran playing their own nationalities. Felix thinks: "You have to act as real as possible, because the audience is real, the money is real ..." Fran goes even further: "When it looks like theatre it is wrong because you don't take the audience with you."

At its worst, concept theatre can be arcane, confusing and dull, but this situationist show is alive and vivid throughout. And the issue of social responsibility, particularly regarding the way we receive immigrants, has never been more topical.

I won't spoil the ending, except to say it involves blood, ripped clothing and an aria so pathetically tragic it could melt a Mars bar at 10 paces, not to mention big-money prizes and a climactic dilemma for one unlucky audience member.

Because it's so dependent on risk and chance, it's a different performance every time, but that's not why I'm going again when it comes to London; I want another shot at winning that basset hound.

Bingo!

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