It may take place in a kitchen, but this is emphatically not kitchen-sink drama. Peepshow is a Pan Pan show, which means that whatever happens on stage defies labelling. At recent Dublin theatre festivals, Pan Pan's A Bronze Twist Of Your Serpent Muscles and Tailors' Requiem have played to packed houses, winning admiration - and some bafflement - for the shifting cycles of imagery, gestures, gags, outbursts, and frenzied movement that unfurl, with mysterious, silent spaces in between. Peepshow, with music by The Idiots and Natasha Lohan, was first performed by the company in Gdansk, Poland, as part of the city's millennary celebrations, and has since toured widely in Germany and the Netherlands.
So, what's it about? It takes four characters who live on a small housing estate and attempts to capture the rhythms of an ordinary day, as they take showers, watch TV, wash the dog, and yes, sit in the kitchen munching toast. It depicts the minutiae of habitual behaviour and of characters' attempts to make connections. Words are not necessarily important. Pan Pan Theatre, formed in 1993 by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn, has worked hard at fostering its European links and hosts the highly successful Dublin International Theatre Symposium every January, at the Samuel Beckett Centre, TCD. This is a packed week of workshops, performances and discussions in which the multi-lingual dialogues and cross-currents spin in myriad directions, ranging from language and performance to the nature and function of theatre.
Physical and visual traditions are given priority, and in Pan Pan's own work the text is only one of the languages of performance. This is a chance to see a fresh, sometimes uncomfortably self-conscious, but always thought-provoking way of confronting audiences with actors.
Peepshow is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, TCD from June 9th to 13th. Booking on 01-2800544