Best of BE Festival
Barbican, London EC2
5/5

THE BE (Birmingham Europe) is the city’s only annual festival dedicated to European performing arts and every year it offers three pearls of carefully selected stagecraft at the Barbican’s Pit for a short season.

Opening the showcase, Spaniard Carlota Gavina is a highly strung Juliet, with the audience as the Montagues and a piercing alarm sounding and red lights flashing as soon as she gets anywhere near it.

Back projections of the original text from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and loosely associated pheromonic formulae add to an intriguing if disjointed narrative.

Gavina eventually dashes off in a fit of desperation and her agitation is transmitted back onto a screen from the foyer.

She returns for a non-conclusive epilogue, which appears to ridicule Juliet’s matrimonial aspirations.

Irishman Darragh McLaughlin’s Whistle is a truly ingenious piece in which an aspiring jongleur requires the audience to close their eyes each time he blows a whistle and keep them shut until it is sounded for the second time.

In the moments of “blindness” between the two sound cues McLaughlin switches position and pose and the highly comical result is reminiscent of the jumpy film editing of silent-era film. The sequences accelerate until they disintegrate into a good-humoured and glorious failure.

But the show’s sting in the tail comes with Italian Marco Chenevier presenting the audience with a dilemma.

Cuts and austerity have deprived him of his company, so if the show is to go ahead members of the audience must lend a hand.

The slapstick yet subtle humour of the highly choreographed shambles that follows is an utter delight throughout.

Chenevier impersonates Rita Levi-Montalcini — the left-wing Italian Nobel prizewinner in neurobiology who, aged 100, delivers the “tears in the rain” monologue from Blade Runner. Hilarious.

While all three pieces could have done with some judicious pruning, their undoubted strengths shine through and are yet another example of inspired programming by the Barbican team.

Review by Michal Boncza