Teatro Dei Gordi: Pandora

Last time Italian physical theatre company Teatro dei Giordi came to The Coronet with Sulla Morte Senza Esagerare it was one of the fastest selling shows of the season. This time they bring an extraordinary show about… a public toilet.

Funny, fast paced, at times wildly surreal and at others surprisingly familiar, six actors play over fifty identities in an astonishing feat of physical and visual transformation. 

All sorts of people pass through it. It is a toilet at the end of a corridor or under a city square. It could be in an airport, a club or a service station.

It is an awkward place of passage, of waiting, of meeting unlikely strangers, an improvised dressing room where one can transform, connect, hide, or let off steam.  In a pit-stop from their ‘real’ lives, people experience the whole spectrum of emotion, from rage and vulnerability, to joy and hilarity. 

But even in a public toilet, there are conventions of behaviour.  How do we feel if they are broken?

Teatro Dei Gordi’s theatrical ‘family’ has worked together for over a decade, with their language rooted in the Italian tradition of mask theatre. Their work has developed to explore everyday masks, like a pair of glasses, an expression, the clothes we wear and the postures we all use. In a public toilet, everyone is anonymous. Everyone is wearing a mask.

Founded in 2010, the common thread of the Teatro dei Gordi’s path to date is the search for a specifically theatrical language, made of movement, scores of concrete gestures, objects, clothes, masks, music, poetry, presence and encounter.