Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Joanna Holden, Chloe Purcell, Amelia Pimlott.
Life should be a happy medium between fun and the stay at home nights, the frantic and the exciting and the small release of comfort which comes from looking back on the day, catching up with small jobs and the odd glass of your favourite tipple whilst you relax, look around with a careful eye at your own kingdom and take stock.
Life though has habit of warning you if the extremes of this are pursued, you can burn out the packet of candles quicker by setting both ends alight or you can become too entrenched, the same routine, safe, careful, dull, no adventure; no Wild Life to make a memory and give you a reason to let the pulse race that little harder.
If you won’t come to the wild side then don’t be surprised if the wild side comes to you, start to let the grass grow under your feet and soon there is a jungle around you, every little noise in the kingdom of your own making suddenly becomes a roar, the terror grows and all because your routine does not take into account that you have become stale and food for imagination you have suppressed.
The Ding Foundation’s Wild Life is a stark reminder of that the comfortable should never be too alluring, that to remember how to smile, to feel the heart move, sometimes you have to take on the jungle, you have to defy the expectations and prove to yourself that you are still alive.
When it comes to combining puppetry with the resonance of humanity within a play, being alive takes on extra special meaning, we see in ourselves the manipulated and the controlled, we feel empathy for the lifeless soul in front of us and yet we see a force, a measure of the same features within our own blank eyes; it is in the puppet that we live our lives and Wild Life captures the struggle between the woman and the influenced with perfect, sensuous clarity of performance.
A heartfelt play, Wild Life serves up a jungle of emotions, the urge to make sure you never fall into the pit of personal abandonment and become stale, a ghost of yourself; for nobody should ever feel that small or insignificant. A wonderful production!
Ian D. Hall