Review: Farm Fatale

Be careful what you wish for: a scarecrow so successful in their endeavour…may scare away the birds forever…and rue the reverb of redundancy. Perhaps not their doing. Who knows? Certainly not the scarecrows.

Farm Fatale presents a twist on mimetic re-enactment. A near bucolic set stretches before us: elevated sacks on one side, a smattering of haystacks on the other, all separated by a milky white expanse. Messages in English, signs in German. Menace rarely ever looks this congenial. Five scarecrows emerge, with staccato physicality, to work together as a community in this soft apocalypse. Their world is cleaner and happier without the presence of humans. Perhaps you would expect that. Disarmingly funny, these characters set about using discarded technology to record events. The performance begins with them listening to a recording of birdsong. A memory of a reason for their existence. Of better times maybe. When they had purpose. Now, there’s different work to be done. As journalists for pirate radio, a queen bee must be interviewed: what is royalty when there are no workers? As guardians of the world, cultures must be nurtured: what’s in the eggs when there are no parents? As musicians with instruments, foes must be defeated: what’s mechanised farming…when there is pop music?

Philippe Quesne’s “theatre of post-apocalyptic deceleration” dangerously enchants with it’s striking performance inhabited by dreamers. These charming scarecrows…these laconic ‘carecrows’…these sweet soul avengers…these atavistic activists are there to remind us that when something is lost, all that remains is a memory. Listen to our straw friends. Don’t succumb to calamitous capitalism. Don’t kill. And don’t stone the crows.

Farm Fatale was performed on 7th October at the Tramway, Glasgow.