Tinker Tales is playful, inventive and warmly human.
Fiona Hallenan-Barker
4 Nuts and bolts
Venue: Playhouse
Sydney Opera House
Dates: 3rd – 5th October
What happens when three men are told they to build a new structure, but there aren’t enough skilled workers? In Tinker Tales, the answer is to improvise. Build, juggle, dance, dismantle, repair, and occasionally send a ball flying into the audience.
A largely wordless work of physical theatre, Tinker Tales is built around the pleasures of making things. Its world is wonderfully tangible: coffee pots, dustpans, mops, power tools, scaffolding, a giant fan, a boot, hard hats, trolleys, wooden A-frames, bicycle-wheel frames and assorted flotsam and jetsam are pressed into service. The set feels like a cross between a building site, a men’s shed, a playroom and Reverse Garbage. A giant, live-action Meccano set.
There is something particularly Sydney about this fascination with construction. With the Sydney Opera House itself looming over the production as perhaps the city’s ultimate feat of engineering (famously marked by mistakes, delays and problems along the way), it is tempting to imagine Jørn Utzon enjoying these performers’ fascination with making, problem-solving and transforming materials. The production could almost have been tailored more explicitly to its surroundings with some site-specific wit giving it an additional local spark.
There is plenty of spark nevertheless. Andreas Denk, Ali Shafiee and Chérif Zaouali have an appealing physical chemistry. Their vocabulary encompasses juggling, acrobatics, mime, clowning and dance as they balance precariously, construct structures, knock them down and repair whatever goes wrong. The pleasure is often in watching the three performers solve problems through smoothly choreographed sequences.
The production’s imagery is at its best when the mundane becomes magical. A plastic bag transforms into a smiling face hovering above the stage. A washing machine undergoes a comic medical procedure to produce bubbles. At one point, the builders break into a tango. Each sequence transforms the familiar movements of construction into choreography.
The physical comedy occasionally recalls the absurdity of Monty Python, particularly in Denk’s wonderfully silly movement. There are also echoes of DV8 Physical Theatre in the production’s exploration of male bodies and masculinity. Yet Tinker Tales offers a gentler vision of masculine identity. These men can be strong, physical and traditionally masculine while also dancing beautifully, balancing, cooperating and caring for one another. Chérif Zaouali is particularly delicate in his precisely skilled movement. The men don’t need to compete by putting each other down. In a show ostensibly about construction, collaboration becomes as important as physical strength.
The interactive elements are particularly effective when they dissolve the boundary between construction site and auditorium. Balls fly into the audience, pipes extend into the crowd and the performers dance with the spectators. At times, however, the interaction feels tantalisingly intermittent. The intimacy of the Studio space might have allowed the performers to incorporate the whole audience more fully, rather than periodically reaching out from the stage.
The production is strongest when its imagery serves its central ideas of building, problem-solving and cooperation. At other moments it becomes theatre of imagery for imagery’s sake: an object appears because it is amusing or visually striking, without necessarily contributing to the larger narrative. The performers construct plenty of things, but because the audience sees much of the process, there is a limit to genuine theatrical surprise. The eventual collapse of the entire stage structure, culminating in a satisfying cascade of dominoes, provides a fitting finale, although the journey there can feel more episodic than cumulative.
Even so, the hands-on aesthetic has considerable charm. There is a strong sustainability ethos in the celebration of ordinary, discarded and repurposed materials. A coffee pot, mop or washing machine can become theatrical machinery; a power tool can become the starting point for a rhythmic musical sequence. The production invites children to look at everyday objects differently: not simply as things to use, but as things to transform.
Tinker Tales is also entering a crowded school-holiday market. It competes not only with major commercial productions but with Sydney’s abundance of clowning, circus and acrobatic comedy, including work presented through Sydney Fringe and the Spot On Festival. The inaugural Wild Things Festival at the Sydney Opera House gives it a useful point of difference, opening the Creative Learning Centre to pre-show tinkering for children and offering free activities for young audiences across the precinct. The ethos of Tinker Talesextends naturally into that wider festival environment.
The underlying proposition is simple: building something together means encountering problems and solving them together. In an age when the word “builder” can conjure an image of rough physical labour, Tinker Tales offers a more generous alternative, one in which strength includes creativity, movement, care and collaboration.
When all the pieces of its theatrical machinery connect, Tinker Tales is playful, inventive and warmly human.
Photo credit Marlon Visser
Fiona Hallenan-Barker, Theatre Now
