Review: Ockham’s Razor, The Mill, York Theatre Royal (From York Press)

Review: Ockham’s Razor, The Mill, York Theatre Royal

8:07am Tuesday 23rd November 2010 in Music news and reviews

“Ockham’s Razor” is a 14th-century principle simply stating “the simplest option is both preferable and more likely correct”.

The new show by the award-winning aerial theatre company named for this medieval philosophy lived up to their name: magnificent in its simple narrative; refulgent in its aerial artistry.

The Mill, Ockham’s Razor’s first full-length show, sees five performers – Alex Harvey, Tina Koch, Charlotte Mooney, Stefano Di Renzo and Steve Ryan – work on an intricate system of ropes and pulleys with a human-sized hamster wheel suspended from a seven-metre rig at its heart. Think Heath Robinson mixed with MC Escher.

Continuously under the scrutiny of a disembodied taskmaster, the workers slog on, with some mischievous slacking off involving tightrope-walking, until a piece of machinery collapses.

The five workers desperately scramble to fix the machine.

This includes climbing up ropes, hanging upside down from the heights of the rig and spinning uncontrollably around the wheel.

The artistry of the performers was not ostentatious or overly complicated.

They were full of risk but made to look so simple, even elegant.

Directed by Toby Sedgewick – Olivier Award winner for Best Theatre Choreography for War Horse – and with an ethereal musical score by Derek Nisbet, The Mill told through physical theatre the story of five exploited humans, made to be cogs in a machine, who inadvertently overthrow the system.

It’s the circus version of The Matrix.

The audience were open-mouthed and enchanted at The Mill’s saturnine ending.

What the mill manufactured is never known, but what Ockham’s Razor created on stage was absolutely beautiful.

Jonathan Wilkes