Mechanimal

There’s a man onstage and he’s pretending to be a bird. He’s trying to fly and he’s attempting birdsong and he’s migrating to the city. He’s throwing feathers in the air and jumping off a box. He’s cooing and bouncing around the stage.

There is always a weird moment in the theatre at the Fringe when you say to yourself “is this a joke?” Often it isn’t and you’ll have to find some way to muster a sincere response to something that you have found quite moronic, which is hard but can sometimes be quite rewarding – there are plenty of shows that have started with my “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” that have ended up under my skin – and while I’m convinced that Mechanimal was aware of its silliness –because a bearded man pretending to be a bird is funny and all the stoney-faced audience members in Zoo needed a reminder of that, in my opinion – once I moved past that silliness  the show opened up for me.

It appeared to me to be about trying to decentre the human within the narrative. There was a story about researchers on birds who study their navigation via the stars and their measuring and recording their birdsongs and noticing the ways in which human interventions in the environment like cities and artificial light have damaged the birds’ natural capacities. But the piece did a neat trick of centring not on the researcher, but the birds – and metatheatrically putting the audience in the position of the researchers and the performer, or the performer attempting-to-be-bird, in the position of the bird (or maybe the human who desires to be more birdlike). I don’t know really. It seems to me a lot more complicated the further I get from it.

But I think what I felt really satisfied by was that I seemed to, in a really fascinating trick, have learned loads. Without having a boring scene where two people talk about birds and their flight-patterns, the piece made me genuinely interested in the environmental impact on birds and informed me, while offering some really complex theatrical tricks.

I liked it a lot.

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