Review: The Fantasist’s Waltz, TongueTied Theatre, The Studio, York Theatre Royal (From York Press)

Review: The Fantasist’s Waltz, TongueTied Theatre, The Studio, York Theatre Royal

9:13am Tuesday 21st February 2012 in Theatre By Charles Hutchinson

TONGUETIED Theatre first set mouths talking with their masked production of The Unholy Trinity at York Theatre Royal’s Hatch showcase in 2010.

Since then, directors Kyle Davies and Lizzie Wiggs have been invited to take up residency at the York theatre.

The Fantasist’s Waltz is the first result of the new partnership, a piece of “physically driven storytelling” rooted in Davies and Wiggs’s training under Jacques Lecoq. On James Perkins’s compact, open-plan doll’s house set, actor-musicians Seiriol Davies, Lizzie Wort and Edward Wren set the instrumental scene for Julia Gwynne’s modern fairytale of an ordinary but isolated man (Joe Bone) and his extraordinary fight for survival in a world that has seemingly forgotten him.

At first, this is a tongue-tied, mimed world of gestures, but language comes to play its part in scenes that “illuminate the simple truths of everyday life”, in this case the 9-to-5 grind of the modern office and the hot-air spouted in the name of blue-sky thinking. Aided by Dominic Sales’s music, Bone draws the audience into the dream world of his imagination, where his box of pictures and cuttings builds up a back story. Your reviewer has to put aside his preference for constant dialogue to acknowledge the potency, humour and poignancy of TongueTied’s combination of movement, music and momentum.

• The Fantasist’s Waltz, TongueTied Theatre, The Studio, York Theatre Royal. On tour from March 30 to May 1; see tonguetiedtheatre.co.uk