A Review of Labyrinth Productions’ Crocodile Tears

Half art installation, half two-hander, Natascha Norton’s new play Crocodile Tears presents the fractured world of a broken relationship through the mediums of both theatre and cinema. Through this strange blending of mediums the audience is allowed to gain an insight into moments from a relationship, piecing together the story little by little. It would be hard to provide a more detailed synopsis for this performance than the one that I just have; the story (in the broadest sense of the word) following two unnamed individuals as their relationship develops and subsequently decays. There is no sense of the passing of time, no clear narrative to follow, simply a series of moments.

There is something quite beautiful about this piece, graceful even, as it explores a fractured world of memories spanning both performance space and screen. The scenes are short, often far shorter than the clips, which play out like home movies of holidays abroad and indie movies and something totally unique rolled into one. Something about these scenes makes you feel as though you have entered an immersive experience, one where you too should be lying on the ragged mattress watching this play out. This is no doubt the reasoning behind the thrust seating, which despite the angle still allows the screen to be clearly visible from all angles. In fact, the screen is given a little more ceremony than perhaps one might expect, with the use of lit fabric drapes either side of the projection. A nice touch.

The programme talks about the beauty of things falling apart, the language focussing on unravelling and the piece certainly achieves this. There is a strange intimacy in watching the memories play out as the actress lies upon the bed, watching and fidgeting, unable to truly relive what she is seeing and not quite able to settle. Elektra Voulgari Cleare’s performance is one of agitation, of movement and spiralling emotions, while Flynn Ivo’s character fails to truly engage with her rollercoaster. He is the detachment to her intensity. The scenes played out in real time upon the ragged mattress are short and as disjointed as the scenes upon the screen, with a definite downside being the staging. Choosing a seat on one of the sides of the thrust, I was at a severe disadvantage when it came to watching some of the scenes.

This is a peace of art which straddles a range of mediums creating something that feels like a unique medium of its own. The fractured design of the performance as a whole leaves the audience with questions left unanswered and plot lines unexplored, but that rather appears to be the point. The creative team have worked together to create something that feels very abstract and modernist and a shoutout must go to Director of Photography George Robson for the filmed sequences. As a whole, it is an incredibly immersive experience which has been wonderfully thought through. I could feel what the multimedia performance was hoping to achieve; however, I would be curious to see how it would look if purely cinema… Perhaps with the actors still present in the darkness as we see in the current iteration.

Image courtesy of Hilla Sewell