Halfway through its two-week run, and the London International Mime Festival has produced a gem. It's a short, rag-taggity, low-key gem that only slowly unfolds its charms, and even then you're not completely sure what the 70-minute Du Goudron et des Plumes means.
The title, which translates as tar and feathers, is only an oblique clue. It could be the story of surviving a shipwreck, with the performers tossed on the sea like The Tempest's Dukes of Milan.
There's the clang-clang of a ship's bell, a swaying boatswain, and a huge platform suspended above the stage over and around which the five performers run and roll.
This show-defining prop sways like the briny, both dominating your vision and disrupting your spatial anchors. It literally puts you at sea, with the performers evoking sail-boat bunting as they fly from its rigging like flags in the wind.
These visual and physical cues suggest a boat journey, although it could just as well be a journey of the mind imagined from a garden swing. Indeed, the show seems equally about emotional storms as maritime ones.
It's the work of Mathurin Bolze, who is one of the performers and a leading light of so-called new French circus. This isn't the roll-up, roll-up circus of old, where routines are heralded and performed with much ado.
Instead, Bolze smuggles in acrobatics, tumbling, wire-walking and clowning as part of his show, making circus seem the obvious way to tell a story.
Excepting the stilted first 10 minutes, and the less interesting shadow sequence, the show is magical. The performers are exceptionally good, moving with a feathery ease that is counterintuitive to the difficulty of their moves. And the title? Perhaps not a punishment, but the weathproofing of boats and the flight of birds.
London International Mime Festival runs until Sunday. Information www.mimefest.co.uk
Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze: Du Goudron Et Des Plumes (Tar And Feathers)
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, Barbican, EC2Y 8DS
