The Coronet Print Room, London
October 25, 2017
Charlotte Kasner
The shabbiness of the Coronet with its gloomy lighting, peeling paintwork and odd assortment of hipster chic accoutrements and semi-clad usherette is a perfect setting for Victoria Thierree Chaplin’s witty, short, Bells and Spells. She and Jaime Martinez present a seamless performance with a props list and set that is a stage manager’s nightmare. They range through a plethora of emotions from corny to poignant and are fully deserving of their final applause.
The opening section is heavily suggestive of a poltergeist presence that could be the departed spirit from the venue’s glory days as a theatre when the 1898 Era magazine described it as a “theatre of which the whole country may be proud.” A row of people pop up and down and shift seats in an odd game of musical chairs where the seats remain static. It is only when they finally depart and the seats move independently, flapping like gossips’ tongues, that the audience is let in on the reason for their discomfort.
The rest of the set then comes out in sympathy. The weird and wonderful comes thick and fast. The seats glide off, the table slides away and the wall suddenly rips open, revealing a concealed hussar, who dances a tango with a tall woman, her cocktail dress clacking on the floor like a beaded Miss Haversham. Camouflage netting drops from above, fronted by a woman wearing a voluminous dress of the same material, but with a life of its own. It sways and swirls like an ocean current in a storm, and engulfs a man, only to spit him out again swathed in the same fabric.
It gets better. A walk-on revolving door revolves to reveal a couple. Between them, they execute an odd trio until walls appear with a desk, behind which a woman ‘removes’ her head, which promptly slides up and down the walls before plopping into vases.
So Bells and Spells weaves its weird way. There’s a man with a washing basket revolving on his head, one of the sheets materialising (literally) into a woman made of washing. They turn folding, pleating and turning a sheet into a parody of a Romantic ballet blanc. The fun ends all too soon when she suddenly climbs the final hanging sheet like a fly scaling a window pane and vanishes as if into thin air.
Marvellous stuff. A work in progress maybe, but Bells and Spells provides an amusing preview for the completed piece, which it is to be hoped we will have the opportunity to see in the not too distant future.