They say once you know how a trick is done, it loses its magic. This is not true. In the case of Tobias Wegner’s acrobatic comedy, it’s how the magic is made.
It’s a simple premise: three sides of a room for a set, one fiercely strong acrobat, and a video camera tipped on its side, projecting onto a big screen alongside. The floor becomes a wall, the wall becomes a floor, and gravity is the punchline. Tobias Wegner leans on the wall of a small, featureless room, wearing a hat and suit and carrying a small suitcase, and waiting for something or someone. Except he isn’t leaning on the wall: he’s holding his entire body weight up on one arm, with his feet resting casually on the wall.
Developed by German company Circle of Eleven with Wegner from a comedy act into a full show, Leo has a definite street theatre feel about it. Despite its no doubt epically finicky set-up, one still half-expects Wegner to do a turn around the theatre on a unicycle at the end with hat outstretched. (I’d have put in $20.)
There’s great potential for comedy in this shifting of gravity, and Wegner rolls smoothly and stylishly through every possible application, then moves on to the comedic possibilities of projection. As if being an extremely polished acrobat and actor wasn’t enough, Wegner also demonstrates perfect comic timing, unreasonably good drawing skills, and just so you can really wish he’d spontaneously combust and stop making you feel like a total failure, he plays the saxophone too. Sideways.
Directed by theatre polymath Daniel Brière, Leo was a smash hit at Edinburgh Fringe, taking three awards (including Best of Edinburgh) – so successful, in fact, that a spin-off with a different performer is currently touring Europe and the US. But we here in Australia have the original article, for a summer season at Arts Centre Melbourne and then at the Adelaide Fringe in March. It’s easy to see why the show did so well: it’s funny, original, and entertaining, and features feats of strength that would’ve made a Victorian lady fan herself – and possibly swoon. It’s also a show that will go down well with all ages: the Arts Centre suggests ages 10 and over, but that’s probably because children under 10 will be unable to stop themselves narrating the show in wonderment and awe. (In fact, several of the adult audience seemed to have the same problem on opening night.)
Despite all the gushing, Leo isn’t a flawless show. The work has distinct sections, each based around a quite different set of theatrical tropes, and Wegner has to work quite hard to make each subsequent routine part of the same narrative, involving a bored man trapped in a small blank room. The narrative goes completely south in the final section, with all comedy suddenly dispensed with and replaced with an accomplished but slightly-too-long, mildly hallucinatory and largely non-consecutive contemporary acrobatic/dance routine. The net result is a feeling that the contents of Leo sprang straight from a brainstorming session on the premise of a sideways camera and a projector, rather than being constructed as a theatrical whole.
It’s also painful but necessary to mention that one of the work’s most important props, thanks to a bit of light bleed and the eagle eye of the camera, didn’t quite function as it was meant to on opening night. In a technically complex show, this probably seems like nitpicking, and perhaps it will never happen again, but take note, show producers.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Circle of Eleven, Y2D Productions and Chameleon Productions present
Leo
Performed by Tobias Wegner
Directed by Daniel Brière
Creative Producer: Gregg Parks
Set and Lighting Design: Flavia Hevia
Video Design: Heiko Kalmbach
Animation realised by Ingo Panke
Costume Design: Heather McCrimmon
Choreography: Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola
Technical Director: Clemens Kowalski
Lighting Director: Wendy Clease
Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio
15 – 27 January
The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Adelaide
15 February – 16 March
