Theater Review: Murmures des Mur

What’s not to enjoy about 'Murmures des Murs' (Murmuring Walls)?

MURMURES DES MURS 370 (photo credit: Richard Haughton)
MURMURES DES MURS 370
(photo credit: Richard Haughton)
What’s not to enjoy? Murmures des Murs (Murmuring Walls) is elegant, super-imaginative, delicate, whimsical, witty, robust, farcical, mysterious, all of it bundled together with panache and virtuosity by the performances of Aurelia Thierée, Victoria’s daughter, by mostly-dancer Jaime Martinez and by mostly-clown/acrobat Magnus Jakobsson.
Built loosely around a young woman (Aurelia) moving house with the men as the movers, Murmures too is constantly on the move the way dreams are, because in dreams things, places, clothes, people seamlessly appear, disappear, shape and time-shift.
Tall apartment houses slide on and off, absorbing, then ejecting the players. There’s a praying mantis-like critter made of bubble-wrap. Walls peel. Strange creatures appear, like a “bird” whose head is a bellows, or a flailing sea-serpent. Objects are made suddenly animate, and as suddenly revert. Events flow into one another.
Life is ephemeral, tricky, Murmures insinuates in a score of beguiling variations. It’s like bubbles whose iridescent beauty delights us for a moment, and then, “like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.” “Rack” means “residue” and Murmures, enchanting as it is to watch, needs some.