Snails and Ketchup

Snails and Ketchup, an hour-long wordless one-man show, is based on Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees. It tells of a young man who turns his back on his family after being forced to eat snails at a typically dysfunctional dinner. He flees into the trees, carving out a new existence in the branches, distant from those below, like one of JM Barrie's Lost Boys, only with added gastropods.

But finding out the plot through a quick internet search was a revelation after watching a performance where it was far from clear who was who, how many characters there were, and simply what was going on.

Of all art forms, wordless ones are the most like Chinese whispers: if the plot thread is lost early on, then what follows is an increasingly amplified distortion. This is a shame as the lone performer Ramesh Meyyappan is obviously a skilled physical artist. He swoops above the stage, in the treetops, with grace and drama. His mimicry of the snails is gently comedic. And in the most coherent scene, he relives the traumatic birth of twins from all perspectives: the disinterested father, the wailing mother, the wriggling babies themselves.

But these are silent snippets. Piecing them together to create a narrative that makes sense is harder, like studying a very dense Cubist painting. The audience seems to lap up Meyyappan's performance, but missing vital physical clues early on can leave you feeling lost. For all its dexterity and the live musical score, Snails and Ketchup leaves nothing but indigestion.