★★★★
Pleasance, Courtyard | £15.5014.50 | 13:30
I used to say that physical theatre wasn’t really my thing. However, over the last few years several Fringe performers have won me over. I can definitely include German company Familie Flöz on that list.
As you walk into ‘Infantia’ the show has already begun as a silhouette scene is playing out in the background of the set. These silhouettes as it turns out act as punctuation between scenes, cuing up the next sequence or continuing the last. The show is centred around youth and old age, one set of scenes in a nursery and the other around a new arrival in a care home whose only connection to his departed love is the music that she played.
All the characters you see are played in larger than life masks that actors manage to impressively emote with their body language making the static faces somehow change expression through a scene. The production manages to convey age not only through the acting but using scale, with massively blown up sets when the toddlers appear on stage. One particular scene begins with a child trying to stand which received a large number of awwwwwws from the audience sitting around me.
‘Infanita’ has some hilarious and moving moments, some of the scenes do seem slightly out of place, or too long but overall it is well worth going to see.
