Compagnie maguy marin choreography

May B is slippery, Beckett bleak and wryly brilliant. Existentialism in action—Sartre’s Being and Nothingness perhaps—though the action is mostly very slow shuffling to grunts, sighs and dissonant shouts—in essence mobile tableaux vivants.

White-faced clown performers in ragged clothes covered in plaster of Paris clay, dust flying off them as they collide, big black eyes: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Mardi Gras-masked Mummers, all come to mind.

I even wonder if Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade of 1967 was an influence, staged as it was in an asylum.

Life is a grim circus, a game of chess, and Endgame is the play May B is based on. “Fini, c’est fini…”—“finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”, its opening lines spoken by Clov, except it’s not.

Blackness, Schubert lieder, shrill whistles, then silence, another whistle and slowly the ten dancer actors appear out of the murk, form a circle, the tension painful.

The tiniest gesture is relev