Notions of split realities

KELLERMAN, Lowry Quays, Salford, by Paul Genty

HOW far does a theatre company go before it becomes a video company? How far a live work before it might as well be on video tape?

These thoughts might pass through the mind of anyone who sees Imitating The Dog’s clever, fascinating but ultimately rather unsatisfying, cold-wrought mixture of visual effects, live action and video projection in “Kellerman”, repeated again tonight at the Lowry.

The subject is clever but not engaging, tying itself up in notions of split realities and changed history.

Kellerman, it transpires, believes he had a wife and child, but is diagnosed as delusional and put in an asylum, where he calculates that he is not delusional but that over a 300-year period he has made choices that have altered the course of his reality, robbed him of his believed existence and substituted a different one.

On a remarkable dual-height set by Laura Hopkins — she was also responsible for the free-ranging look of the National Theatre of Scotland’s fabulous “Black Watch” — the cast literally lip-synchs to video projections played on the the rear wall of large slits and squares, opened letterbox-like in a solid black wall across the front of the stage.

The actors thus can run down projected corridors, stand in spaces defined by pictures and cycle through woods, their movement seen in these cinema screen-like shapes.

This brilliant framing device even offers real-life tricks, such as one of nurses eating at a long table, seen by the audience from high above the nurses’ heads.

There’s even a moment when eyes meet across a room and the couple spins and the world falls away for a moment — courtesy of their standing on a small turntable!

Specially-composed music and sound add to the eerie atmosphere of this interval-free, 100-minute immersion in a strange world.

But, and it’s a big but, every new trick and projection takes Kellerman closer to the subject of the play — the mind of a delusional mathematician — and further away from audience empathy and interest.

At times you wonder what all the effort is for, except the flashy results — for it seems not really to be theatre but live video, and that’s not really possible, is it?