The Terrible Tale of the Twiddly Widdlies

Two men in tailcoats stand onstage, their heads completely bandaged. In theory, their faces should become projection screens, with animations providing their expressions. In reality, a moustache has just moved to someone’s forehead of its own volition and two eyes have appeared on the wall. Oh dear.

What a complete mess. If you’re going to use projection like this, your actors have one job and one job only: hit the mark. That’s it. Stand in the right spot and let the light find its target. Here, a newspaper has half a headline and a man has been covered with wallpaper. It’s not even like the animation’s any good: facial features that might have been copied and pasted from ClipArt. If you’re intrigued by the Twiddly Widdlies, save yourself for 1927 at the International Festival.

Structurally, it’s a cabaret of dark poems: the Twiddly Widdlies are child-eating pig people living in a forest; the Radio Ramblers, two 1930s BBC sorts with clipped RP accents. Clem Garritty and Oliver Jones’s writing is silly, macabre and piquant. The projections ride roughshod over the lot.

The irony is that they’re not even necessary. The best of the three concerns two Northern blokes, who decide, as a prank on “the wives”, to swap faces à la Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. Having sliced one another’s features with a hacksaw in the shed, they stand before us in bandages; the projector serving only as a stage light. A shambles; a shame.