The Future Sound of Mime: not the mime of yore

The word mime inevitably calls to mind white-faced caricatures in striped shirts and beatnik hats, walking against the wind. In my generation, words like edgy, poignant, or even funny are not what leap to mind. Lame would be a safer bet.

I too was a subscriber to this grossly unfair popular conception until converted by a performance of 'The Boy With Tape on His Face', a mime-in-disguise exercise in sheer hilarity at last year's Comedy Festival. The truth is physical comedy can bee deeply funny, often in ways that are hard to explain, even to ourselves. So when I read of 'The Future Sound of Mime' my curiosity was piqued. And with the titular hat-tip to old-time IDM favourite Future Sound of London, I was sold.

I was not disappointed. Any vestiges of prejudice were blown away by this show - a brilliant series of four vignettes, each featuring a single performer using their face and body to tell the story and move the audience. Props, sets and themes varied from piece to piece but a consistent element was the integration of sound with what was happening on stage. Incorporating original and popular music, noise, and voice samples, the sound design was very tightly bound to the action, and often served to direct the mood or illustrate the narrative. And true to namesake, many parts of the soundtrack would not sound out of place on a FSOL record.

This first piece, 'Crane Girl', is a story of loneliness at 500 feet, featuring Jodee Mundy as our wistful protagonist. As we entered to take our seats we were greeted by the unusual and innovative set, designed to transport the viewer to any of the thousands of shipyards that dot this globe and ensure the smooth supply of everything we take for granted. Complementing this was the sound, which included a voice-over used to drive the narrative. For a show billed as mime this felt a bit like cheating to me at first, but the expressiveness with which Jodee moved the story soon had me forgetting such qualms and joining her in her solitary existence above the shipping containers.

The other pieces featured no such grand set design, and if anything were spartan in their use of set and props. 'Waiting' is a piece for anyone that has ever endured that long wait after a missed or cancelled train (and thus has great appeal for Melbourne audiences). We see Sam Davison as the harried business traveller enduring the long wait for the next train, and what develops as the boredom becomes too much, and his body decides to take matters into its own hands, arms, legs, feet ... you get the picture. Sam is a delight to watch as seemingly discovers his body and environment for the first time, and begins to explore it little by little through movement, imagined spaces, gesture and dance. The laughs come freely, but somewhere underneath the ridiculousness is something about freedom of expression that we can all relate to.

Interrogation, the most abstract of the four, conveys the feeling of fear and desperation, as the victim (played by Jodee) tries to sustain resistance against some unseen foe. The use of industrial sounds and hostile lighting heighten the sense that she is trapped by we-know-not-what. Finally, 'Walking' rounds it out and against all odds emerges as the longest piece, but the simplest. Here the music sets the pace and a well-known archetype shows us what he's got, in this life-as-walking allegory. The laughs are there to be had again, but by the end we all share this walker's sense of achievement, and leave feeling as though we've in some way prevailed.

The Future Sound of Mime presents a polished, thoughtful and funny collection of performance art. It's clearly been put together by some true professionals, so at $13 a ticket it's a real steal, and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to discover that physical theatre is more than beatniks in stripy shirts.