Weird fiction and insects tend to go hand in hand. Perdido Street Station wouldn’t be the same without its Ant-headed ladies. Annihilation needs its creepy crawlies, and pretty much every other weird horror story uses moths and caterpillars, either literally or metaphorically.
Corpse Flower is a show that advertises itself as Kafkaesque because it has insects and social commentary in it, but really, it’s weird fiction fringe theatre that throws everything against the wall to see what sticks. We open with two characters in white face paint chewing the scenery. Clowning, but in a way that’s neither funny nor scary. The direction of the acting is a little too much throughout. Loud, over-exaggerated and poorly done, it feels like a terrible take on Monty Python in places. It’s tricky to tell if it’s meant to be funny, weird or something else.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around a sick family who have been made destitute due to some sort of shenanigans at the local factory. Insects are eating everyone. A single, sane young woman is trying to escape their plight. There’s a subplot about arranged marriages and another about revolution. None of these storylines seem to matter; eventually, everything goes surreal, and the insect people arrive. The pace of the story is too irregular, too slow to build up at the start, and a frantic, hard-to-follow rush at the end. The storytelling is so obtuse it feels more like an 80’s Day of the Tentacle-like video game than a stage show.
The story is set in a rather quaint dystopia: factories produce meaningless products, folk resort to theft and exploitation to survive, worker safety is a sick joke, etc. It’s an awful world invented by someone who hasn’t picked up a newspaper in a while. Corpse Flower is an attempt to create something Kafka-esque; it utterly misses that goal and, in doing so, accidentally creates something a bit more interesting.
Poor writing aside, the performances are mostly solid, especially toward the end, where everyone is a grotesque parody. Props, costumes and staging are all very well done, as are various special effects. This is a show that needed a lot more work before it came to the Fringe. Corpse Flower is mostly pretentious whimsy, but if you’re a fan of the New Weird genre, you may find a lot to enjoy in the show’s performances and staging.
Future show information can be found here at the Threepenny Collective website.
