Landscape with Skiproads

What a title. Like everything in Pieter De Buysser’s quixotic one-man show, it sits somewhere just beyond meaning and dares you to denounce it as nonsense. De Buysser clowns about the stage erecting a very tall tale indeed, one that pulls in Plato, Walt Disney, André Breton and a constellation of geniuses ancient and modern. It’s the story of a young boy and his horse, and of a clutch of objects which spell out the creation story of contemporary thought. 

Wooden plinths with horse-hooves for feet support these eclectic items – the bell that snapped Pavlov’s dog to attention, Henry Ford’s rocking horse, a glove that belonged to the father of free-market capitalism.

The objects are cheekily worked into De Buysser’s surreal narrative, but they also stand for something greater, namely the intrusion of the "world of ideas" into the world of the physical. Adam Smith’s glove mocks his theory of the "invisible hand" of a benevolent marketplace, dust collected from Plato’s cave brings on an attack of conjunctivitis when sprinkled in the eyes. 

De Buysser’s problem is that the density of his text works against the playfulness of his continually delightful ideas, and his own performance errs perilously close to grating, with its pratfalls and gurning. But these issues never come close to obliterating what is a fascinating shaggy dog story that asks one crucial question: what relics of the past, material or conceptual, will we take with us as we’re propelled into our unknowable future?