Peeping Tom, Mother (Moeder)

Peeping Tom, Mother (Moeder), Barbican Theatre, January 24

Hun-Mok Jun and Charlotte Clemens in Peeping Tom’s Mother (Moeder). Photo: Oleg Degtiarov

Peeping Tom’s Mother (Moeder), directed by Gabriela Carrizo and presented as part of this year’s London International Mime Festival, is set in a family-run museum where everything is linked by a creative umbilical cord to the literal, symbolic and surreal notions of motherhood. At the back we see through a glass window into a cubicle that suggests both the clean, aseptic delivery room of a hospital and, on the opposite end of existence, a morgue. It is here, in the opening scene, that a mother (Eurudike De Beul) breathes her last while her family and friends gather in the darkness of the space outside to mourn. The daughter (Marie Gyselbrecht) breaks down on the floor; her tears become a puddle of water in which she splashes but there is no water on the stage. Borrowing from the cinema, Carrizo matches Gyselbrecht’s every gesture with the amplified sounds of Maria Carolina Vieira’s hands splashing in a bowl of water inside the cubicle that has become, in the absence of the corpse, a Foley studio.

Thus begins a series of associative details within dream-like tableaux that exploit the inseparable link between the aesthetics and the affect of the uncanny as a physical language that intensifies the theatrical experience. We are in the hands of magicians of the unconscious who work in time (marked by birthdays and the closing hours of the museum) and a unity of space like a classical setting warped by the Eros and Thanatos of Freudian theory. Water is the substance of tears but also the substance of amniotic fluid in the womb; death and life are never far apart in Moeder, and are even at times superimposed. In a room off the main gallery art imitates life in an exhibit of a coffin with a naked man (Hun-Mok Jung) poised on all fours above it (see photo). It is called One Foot In The Grave, and the cleaner (Charlotte Clamens) clearly has a delightfully erotic attachment to it. As the museum closes for the day the attendant (Brandon Lagaert) covers it in a plastic sheet. Only then does Jung climb down, but he gets caught in the voluminous plastic and thrashes around to get free. “Fucking job”, he says as he gets up. “You were great today”, responds Lagaert. Life is a performance, or so it seems.

Of course theatre is an illusion, but Peeping Tom is adept at making the visceral illusion so convincing that it hurtles against our understanding with all the force of an uncomfortable reality. The treatment of Moeder is not a compassionate look at motherhood but a fractured, fragmented assault on our relationship to it and therein lies its force. The physical vocabulary of disintegration and dislocation as states of mind is phantasmagorical with an anchor resting on the very deep bed of the unconscious. Carrizo is aware of this and sprinkles accents of humour here and there to soften the blow, and watching her performers is to marvel at their abandoned energy and hyperflexibility as much as to flinch at the emotions they are expressing. The duet of Lagaert and Vieria that evinces their despair at the pathological condition of their daughter while De Beul plays damning chords on the organ is literally and emotionally staggering. Music is also a palliative, especially in De Beul’s rich, mellifluous voice singing Erbame dich from Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion or in the powerfully pitch-perfect association of Vieria’s final scream of giving birth in the Foley-studio-turned-birthing room with her gravelly rendering of Janis Joplin’s Cry Baby.

Moeder wades powerfully into a question that relates to the purpose of theatre; it weaves a path between making the shock of its revelations entertaining and clothing its entertainment in shocking imagery. When Gyselbrecht reaches into a still life on the wall she delivers the damp, resisting head of Jung; a drawing of a heart bleeds and the coffee machine is a much loved female called ‘baby’ with whom Gyselbrecht has a torrid affair (to the Sinatra song, I’m a Fool to Want You) that leads to a deadly electric climax. Perhaps because of the richness of creativity in Moeder there is also a danger that the humour extends to self-congratulation — after Gyselbrecht’s tears, the water becomes a Foley exhibit in itself — and in a cast of such extraordinary performers that their abilities become independent extrusions from the physical narrative. But as in the duet of Lagaert and Vieira or when Vieira amplifies the idea of distracting her crying baby by repeatedly somersaulting on to her back, the shock and the entertainment are seamlessly integrated.

Simon Versnel as the father and widowed husband, and Yi-Chun Liu as the pregnant mid-wife complete an extraordinary cast, and those are only the people we see on stage. Moeder is clearly an exceptional collaboration between Carrizo and her team that creates a flow of haunting images about motherhood from which there is no way out but on a gurney of contrasting emotions.