The Times on The Fahrenheit Twins
***** Icy brilliance beneath the fun fur
The set for this beautifully made two-hander by the British company Told by an Idiot looks, at first sight, like an oversized playground. The entire 90-minute performance unfolds on a revolving platform that seems to be covered in polar bear fur, and this includes the giant slide in the middle. What fun.Naomi Wilkinson’s inspired designs are, like the show itself, both efficient and endlessly surprising. The early scenes pack a lot of pleasure as we watch - or, rather, hear and imagine - the birth of the titular Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain (not the biblical references). They’re the offspring of research scientists stationed on a remote Arctic island. Clad in thick, hooded all-in-ones, Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter, who co-founded this company, p0lay all four family members and a handful of hungry sled dogs and sly foxes. Physically precise quick-change artists blessed with near-immaculate timing, the pair devised this adaptation of Michel Faber’s short story along with its director, Matthew Dunster.
The source material is classic fairytale territory, at once dark and strangely familiar. The universe the twins occupy might seem all warm and fuzzy, but there’s nothing cuddly about the twists of their joint fate. Gradually they become an ice-bound Hansel and Gretel at the mercy of the elements and the often quite clinical adults who by, by rights, should have been looking after their best interests. The result is a slow-burning coming-of-age fable as comic as it is cruel, and marked by a deceptive surface charm.
Funny and resonant, this show is more than just exceedingly clever. It casts such a spell partly because those who created it - and that includes the sound and lighting designers, Gareth Fry and Philip Gladwell - are all operating at optimum level. The questioning intelligence they bring to their work is admirable and uncommonly powerful. Springing of Faber’s prose, together they reveal a great deal about lost innocence, nature v reason, relations between the sexes, the tenuous bond between parents and children and the human need to find meaning through ritual and myth, the limits of knowledge and the price of survival.
In the haunting, surreal and seriocomic world of the twins a dog might flick through a copy of National Geographic while defecating, and a sleigh ride can carry a wild, rock’n'roll kick. But just behind the laughter lies a telling awareness of barbarity.
Donald Hutera - The Times, 2009