Picture: Steve Tanner
The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is available on demand from the Bristol Old Vic website from 11-18 December 2020.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
The plan for this show being re-created at the Bristol Old Vic was to have both a live and a virtual audience. Sadly, Bristol is in Tier 3 at the moment, so in the end no audience was allowed into the auditorium while the show was being live-streamed.
Director Emma Rice showed the livestream audience around the auditorium though we so we could see where the camera and sound staff were positioned. I gather the show was broadcast from three cameras which makes it more sophisticated than some of the live-streamed shows I have seen recently and, while the quality was great, I am not sure I liked it better.
The joy of live-streaming has been for me so far to get to see shows I would otherwise not get to see – and from close up – rather than to see a film of the show I am missing which seems to me to be to be a different thing. There certainly is some nice mixing of images and camera angles on what is already a lovely piece of work, but I am not sure it actually adds anything to the ‘live’ experience. This is such a new and experimental art-form though, I look forward to what further developments Wise Children, and Rice, bring in as their live-stream work develops.
The colours of Chagall’s paintings that are reproduced in the set and lighting of this show look good on camera and the music works well. Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson re-create their magic as Marc and Bella which first kindled in the original stage show from 2016. Their physical language together is precious as they hang off ropes to create the angles in Chagall’s paintings and familiarly inhabit the space around each other’s bodies.
The music is lovely and has a sense of ease to it despite its obvious technical difficulty. There are some lovely ideas to bring in extra characters, one is a balloon, one a painting as Chagall paints it and one is the voice of Tom Morris, Bristol Old Vic artistic director, on the phone.
The whole piece is really sweet and if you love musical theatre, or Marc Chagall’s work, or want to learn about Bella and her world or the lost image of Vitebsk as it appears in old postcards or paintings then this show is worth seeing.
Clare Walters
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