Who needs the old stuff? Jack White’s new stuff is that good

The Pigeons
KXT on Broadway
December 11. Until December 21
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★

Beware the office Christmas party.

With its veneer of enforced jollity, it provides infinite opportunities for fights to erupt, scores to settle and ambitions to surface. Just add alcohol.

The family reunion or dinner party might be more favoured theatrical devices for igniting conflict, but this absurd festive farce mines the dynamics of an office party to create a world where chaos and instability rule.

Amid his company’s Xmas bash, the boss Robert (Mark Langham) confides that he intends to disappear. Not just from his party or for a seasonal break. He wants to vanish without trace, forever.

He plans to hand the business to his offsider. It’s a role for which the nervy, paranoid Holger (Andrew Lindqvist) is spectacularly ill-equipped.

Holger is being bullied by the office junior Heidrun (Kandice Joy). She’s out to get him. So is everyone else.

Perhaps a psychiatrist Dr Asendorf (Tel Benjamin) can help. But the dotty doc has troubles of his own. His bedside manner has gone AWOL. He’s unable to remember the names of his patients or even who he is sleeping with.

This play by Germany’s David Gieselmann is a peculiar work indeed. It has no protagonist or antagonist, no character development or discernible motives and a plot that goes nowhere.

Instead, there are nine main odd-ball characters who vary from unstable to utterly unhinged, each with an agenda of their own. They include Robert’s wife Gerlinde (Kath Gordon) who is determined to move to Liguria, their son Helmar (Jackson Hurwood) who prefers Scrabble to sex, and Holger’s wife Natalie (Lib Cambell) who is unable to control her anger.

Their grip on reality shifts by the minute. Or maybe reality doesn’t even exist, at least how we assume it does. Does Robert really disappear? Does he really have an identical brother and pigeon fancier? Or is it just Robert with a bad wig and faux French accent?

This is an unfathomable world in which nothing and everything is true. The rug is constantly pulled from under the characters and the audience. The cumulative effect is frustrating and wearing.

The prolific Gieselmann is best known for his widely performed 1999 play Mr Kolpert, with its absurdist and hilariously gory splatterfest of a dinner party. Written a decade later, The Pigeons is a much less impressive piece.

Without tight direction and razor-sharp timing, the rapid-fire dialogue could so easily fall into an incomprehensible heap.

That it doesn’t is a credit to emerging director Eugene Lynch. He brings wit, energy and great imagination to the production. He also creates some laugh-out-loud moments, not least a sight gag involving part of the psychiatrist’s attire.

With a background in directing opera – most recently as assistant director on Pinchgut’s splendid Guilio Cesare – Lynch injects a musicality into the piece, aided by composer/sound designer Christine Pan.

This is a highly physical and impressively choreographed production by movement director/choreographer Cassidy McDermott-Smith. With nine actors on the tiny performance space throughout, that is no mean feat.

Lochie Odgers’s terrific set blends the banal and the bizarre. The bland office furniture – decked with tinsel – is delightfully at odds with the bold blue and yellow checkerboard carpet. It’s a set that takes a claustrophobic turn late in the piece. There’s no way out of this madness.

Although this is a strong production and well-acted by the large cast, but there’s no getting around a mediocre play that simply does not take wing.

Director Lynch especially is a talent to watch. Let’s hope next time it is with a more worthwhile piece.