The Submarine Show

It's my ambition to make my criticism interesting enough to detain the odd reader -it's difficult enough in the first place, when even I'd rather be playing Avenger's Alliance on Facebook than learning about theatre. Add to this my preoccupation with the more marginal forms of performance - as comedian Ashley Strand suggested, interpretative dance is top of my aesthetic tree - and I end up spending more time trying to explain what I like than actually stating why I like it.

Submarine seems like a good bet, though. The press release notes that it was "created at the Kinetic Arts Center by Jaron Aviv Hollander and Slater Brooks Penney", so it appears to slot into my anti-script, pro-devised theatre obsession, and promises physical theatre. I'm already in, but I have been burnt before: some companies have fooled me by wandering around a stage and calling it "physical", when it is really just another version of Hamlet.


Hollander goes some way to put my mind at ease. "Submarine is as physical as physical theatre gets! We are both heavily involved in dance and circus arts and we draw upon our physical skills to carry the show." The connection to dance and circus is a good one - the word is only an addition in these genres, and it fits that a physical theatre would emerge from them.


"The story, the world, and the characters are told in our own unique language of acrobatic mime supported by vocal sound effects," Hollander elaborates. "The show has no spoken language and yet every moment of a very elaborate narrative is both clear and engaging. To carry this off we have to be physically articulate and athletic. A wonderful results of this wordless language we use is that it makes the show accessible to anybody regardless of what language they speak."


It gets better: Hollander has articulated exactly why I love physical theatre: it has the potential to be both original and accessible. But, I worry, how will it stand out in the context of the Fringe, a notoriously busy arena. Hollander sounds confident.


"We are an acrobatic, a cappella foley mime duet alone in our genre: we engage the audience in a way that few other shows do." 
But are there laughs? The Fringe tends to demand them...
"The show is not only engaging and funny is it offers a unique theatrical experience. Historically this show has attracted most of its audience on word-of-mouth. In every other context the show has created buzz, we believe it will do the same in Edinburgh."

Hollander's claims to the circus are not false: he was in Cirque du Soleil - I might quibble with their aesthetic but not the skill and technique - and Submarine evolved from improvisation around a single sentence: Hollander said to Penney "hey, we are in a submarine!" Taking the idea on the road, they honed the story, as the trapped submariners cross terrains and seek an escape from the bottom of the sea. An encouraging sign was the award for Techie's Choice at the San Francisco Fringe. The techies get to see all the shows, all the time. If they still enjoy it when awards time comes around, something is going right.


" Almost every moment of the show was created in an improvised moment and then refined through repetition," Hollander says. "We began with a wonderful limitation: this proves to be the improvisational equivalent of superhighway. This small cramped space with lots of buttons, switches, and levers lead us toward what still seems to be unlimited possibility."


Even now, as the pair make their first visit to edinburgh, the development continues. "No two shows will be the same!" Hollander promises. "I recommend everybody come to see the show at least three times. There are a few parts of the show that are deliberately unplanned, where we just get to play. Some of the biggest laughs often come from these spontaneous moments."


Back to my original musings on physical theatre, and Hollander has cleared up a few of my concerns. The reason I like devised pieces is exactly because of the potential freedom for each performance to be unique. The lack of a script also makes the show easy to translate into different countries, and the open possibilities of improvisation allow humour and pathos. Now, if I can just keep off Facebook for a few hours...


C too, venue 4, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Dates: 2–27 Aug (not 14)
Time: 16:55(0hr50)
Ticket prices: £8.50-£10.50 / concessions £6.50-£8.50 / children £4.50-£6.50