To Break review: A strange world made out of rough materials

To Break

The Mac, Belfast

***

When you start with nothing, you can dream up anything. With that spirit, the second production from young theatre makers Robbert&Frank/ Frank&Robbert steps neatly into line with Belgian contemporary theatre, whose pursuits are generally agnostic towards the canon and contentedly jump-start a world out of little except imagination, ingenuity and the rough materials of the everyday.

This playfully disjointed piece, presented by the influential Belgian company Campo, is positioned as a children's show for adults. It is almost wordless but with a vision more askew than escapist. Unassuming and carefully impassive, Robbert Goyvaerts and Frank Merkx enter a bare stage against a pleasingly cartoonish backdrop of a desert expanse and begin to make discoveries. Two lengthy thin wooden planks are manipulated naively – they wobble and clack, hoisted up like totems, then spun like helicopter blades – before the search moves on.

It could be a mischievous riff on human progress: a box reveals a mock-up of a philosopher’s bust, but they blow right through the space between its ears to inflate a balloon, before the head recites an insipid poem through a wooden microphone: “Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood and they don’t know how to rest.”

But really it's a kaleidoscopic procession of visual installations with a winning dependence on good carpentry: at one point a scene from Twin Peaks is enacted with pop-up wooden Christmas trees, Goyveart's body disguised as a mountain ridge, Merkx steering a toy car towards an ominous discovery.

Anyone familiar with Miet Warlop's phenomenal Mystery Magnet, also for Campo, will recognise a show similarly inclined to mint and pursue its own twisting logic, and Robbert&Frank are likewise more inclined to offer an experience than any particular provocation.

Although less sophisticated than Warlop's dreamscapes, there are similarly dark folds of the imagination here, where a xylophone blares out distortion, a gun turns out to be edible or a tiny chair is cruelly executed on the gallows. Everywhere violent acts collapse into cute imagery, or vice versa. To Break ultimately finds reality all too much to bear. "Your mind is like a box of chocolates," they are told, and over the course of this hour-long trip, it starts to melt.