Best of BE Festival

Barbican Centre, London EC2/Touring

3/5

THE BIRMINGHAM European (BE) festival has been up and running for five years and for two weeks in July the city gorges itself on international performance work, conceived with much inventiveness and often laudably experimental stagecraft, with 20 companies participating this year alone.

The three deemed the most outstanding tour Britain and Spain over the next month, starting with these performances at the Pit in the Barbican.

The formula is refreshingly simple — the plays have a maximum running time of 30 minutes. The proposition that half an hour is enough time for anything of merit to be articulated is undeniable but its effectiveness here varies.

First on stage is Hungary-based Radioballet — the one-man-does-all Milan Ujvari — with From the Waltz to the Mambo, inspired by a 1960 ballroom manual. As Ujvari reads from it he conscientiously and contortedly mimes the old-fashioned instructions, ever increasing in their complexity, to great comic effect. 

It is a masterly blend of mimicry to a subtly chosen music score, measured textual delivery and improbable body movement that ends in a fabulously irreverent take on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. 

A treat, and it’s easy to see why Ujvari was voted best performer at the BE festival.

The audience participation required by Austrian Julia Schwartzbach’s In Loops And Breaks leads to rather inconsequential chaos, akin to a party game gone horribly wrong, which appears to suit the carousers among the audience.

Waiting by Mokhallad Rasem of Belgium is a moving and often harrowing meditation on the ill-treatment endured by migrants at the hands of insensitive authorities in “host” countries.

Yet the idea of projecting speaking faces onto three outstretched and continuously shape-changing sheets in total darkness is intriguing for 15 minutes or so before repetition and tedium dissipate much of the emotional charge.

Tours nationally until November 8, details: befestival.org

Michal Boncza