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frame, attributed in the programme to Nelissen Co, tilts, heaves, crumbles, throws up sand and rocks, from a sewage outlet spews stylised detritus including dummy bodies, and finally swells and subsides like a living, breathing organism. The performers are led by Gerard Pillen (the characters are not differentiated in the programme), and the whole intriguing, technically impeccable experience bears as much resemblance to the traditional mime of mimsy feerie and wistful clowns, mercifully, as Starlight Express does to Salad Days. □ Martin Hoyle, Financial Times, 11. Jan. 1988.

The waste land restored Hinderik de Groot, the author and artistic director of this production by his own Amsterdam-based company, Studio Hinderik, has been a puppeteer and marionettist. Now, it seems, the chief object of his manipulation is not puppets or even actors but space ín the theatre. At the centre of this production is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine for acting, a hydraulic platform which can be raised, lowered and tilted with seamless ease and which becomes, in turn, a cine-

ma screen, a vast table-cum-bed and the sidewalk of the title. But, if this sounds like technological wizardy for its own sake, it is justified by the originality and beauty of the imagery it makes possible. A narrative framework, of a fragmentary kind, is provided by a series of letters, read out on tape, from the unnamed protagonist (a middle-aged man in a brown suit) to his friend Gerard and by the silent black and white film of the object of his love, the young boy David. The words, though, merely act as a gloss on the mimed images which form the heart and guts of the play. These images often recall the Surrealist painters in their dreamlike illogicality and their evocation of an immense nostalgia. For most of the play the platform is the sidewalk, a symbolically charged piece of waste spa-

ce. It is something of a crazy pavement: the lines of paving stones fan out from a vanishing point at front centre stage in reversed perspective. At times the stones heave and crack open; objects emerge, like a reptilian, infinitely extendable lamppost; or change, like the crumpling Beckettian dustbin. In a particularly powerful moment the platform lifts and we descend into the drains below the sidewalk: through the sewer runs a rubbery skein of detritus, to which a series of moulded representations of the young David are attached. The images become more perfect, and the decay into indistinction. □ Harry Eyres, The Times , May 8, 1987.'