The World Mouse Plague

The building is infested. Mice have moved in and they need to be dealt with. But the authorities also need to move the tenants, who are being relocated against their will for refurbishments. And now a theatre company have arrived and they’re performing a site-specific, immersive, durational, verbatim show about genocide. In mouse costumes.

Confused? You’re not the only one. As in The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland, Ridiculusmus set out to baffle, though this time in the interest of questioning what art can and can’t discuss. Layers of fiction and meta-fiction slip and slide, as David Wood and Jon Haynes take on the many different roles between them, all the while sporting tails and whiskers. It’s fast-paced, chaotic and deliberately difficult to follow.

Amid the anarchy, it’s possible to discern a number of overlapping strands. The imaginary theatre production prods at the ethics of representation, taking as its target the kind of queasily problematic immersive experiences that abound on the Fringe, while its appropriation of the building nods to the role that artists play in gentrification. Then there are the mice, whose treatment has deliberate echoes of both past genocides and present rhetoric about stemming immigration.

The show is also frequently silly, tackling these heavy topics with a lightness of touch. But there is the danger that, along with creating confusion, that all the knowing references to immersion and verbatim amount to one big theatrical in-joke. The audience, like the mice, runs the risk of being left out in the dark.