Heads on Crooked’s debut project, Mushroomification is witty, bitter, and some of the most intelligent and provocative writing I have seen about our current situations.
This is a production that seems designed solely to facilitate Garrick Pagel and Till Schindler’s script, but the script is so stellar that it is clear to see why. It opens with a mushroom wanting to grow legs, break free from the connected fungi network and become an individual. The second scene concerns two brothers, Erwin and Karies, who scientifically experiment on mushrooms to their own ends. Who controls the experiment is decided by a rigged coin flip. A meekish Karies is able to humiliate Erwin into letting him win the coin flip, and quickly turns into a tyrant, paradoxically wanting to unify the human race into one collective much like mushrooms. The play develops from here, with Karies finding the mushroom from the first scene, and bringing it back to the lab for a series of events in crescendo.
It is a script with striking ideas. It thematises domination, the individual versus the collective, a human being’s innate tyranny. On an opening night filled with the company’s friends, it developed a sort of quasi-irony to it, with the audience relishing in the absurdity of a play revolving around a mushroom suit, and enjoying the more pantomimic excesses of the text. The joy of the whole thing is that it is such an unpredictable script to which a different audience might react entirely differently: with tragic air, with outrage, with bewilderment. Pagel and Schindler have created a work of such symbolic density, of such currency, yet one impossible to reduce to simple allegory. It is utterly mental, and utterly magnificent, and worth seeing simply to hear the words said in space.
In a way, the script being this good means the production itself came across as more
functional than anything. This being said Yashique Chalil’s technical design was rich and evoked the play’s two spaces with ease and care, and there were some especially funny choices for showing the machine at the play’s centre in action. The set was dominated by a machine slash bit of forest centre stage, and the method of representing both was sufficiently inventive. Some mushrooms were strewn upstage, which gave the play an off-kilt feel from the off. Isaac Frost and Till Schindler gave good performances as the two scientists and Garrick Pagel was a hoot as the mushroom.
Still, it is worth noting a development of this project might involve a little more attention to the piece’s physicality. It was at times textually engaging, but screaming for more visual inventiveness. A work that used this excellent text as a springboard for theatrical play, rather than used theatre as a facilitator for literature, is a natural next step for this project.
Ultimately, however, these criticisms are almost irrelevant. This is a stellar piece of work, with real edge and provocation. It is absolutely right for this year’s Fringe and our current situation. Catch it if you can!
Image by Heads on Crooked