Review: Atlas (Oddly Moving)

Tuesday 8th March 2022
The Lowry, Salford

On Tuesday 8th March, I was at The Lowry to see Atlas, a retelling of the Atlas myth by Oddly Moving. I’ll be reviewing this production on Hannah’s Bookshelf, my weekly literature show on North Manchester FM, later in the month. But here’s the blog version of my review…

Produced by Turtle Key Arts and directed by Charlotte Mooney, Atlas is a three-woman, single-act performance that retells the classical myth of Atlas, the titan condemned to eternally carry the entire weight of the cosmos, through physical theatre, storytelling and circus skills.

The play opens on a fairly plain and empty stage – this is a piece of theatre that relies much more of props and performance than stage dressing. A woman (Grania Pickard) collects a cardboard box full of toy figures, lays them out on a mirrored surface, and begins to narrate the story of Cronos, Zeus, and the war between the gods and the titans. It’s a light-hearted and intimate narration, in which Pickard comically illustrates Cronos devouring his own children with the help of some plastic dinosaurs and zoo animals. It feels almost like the way you might tell the story to children, and both the performance space and the performance style enhance the almost cosy informality of the narration.

When the woman reaches the introduction to Atlas, and Cronos’s recruitment of this particular titan to lead the army against Zeus and the other gods, Pickard is joined on stage by another performer (Arielle Lauzon) who silently dons a breastplate and wrist guards, ready for battle.

It’s at this point that the performance moves away from the gentle storytelling and into a more physical representation of the myth. The war between the titans and the gods is illustrated through stylized physical theatre, with Pickard and Lauzon being joined by the third performer, Helena Berry.

As the play continues, different modes of physical performance are used to create vignettes in Atlas’s story. Berry mimes the Labours of Herakles; Lauzon juggles with the golden apples of the Hesperides; Pickard collects and deposits an assortment of small hessian sacks, moving them round the stage to transform them from sandbags on the battlefield, to a weighty burden to be cleared away single-handedly, to sacks of soil that turn the stage into a garden. The fluidity of these movements works well with the storytelling style, as though we’ve moved from imagining the story through the plastic animal toys to imagining it through the movement of the performers on stage.

As I said, the story is presented through a series of vignettes, which are laced together by Pickard’s storytelling narration. A standout for me was Berry’s swaggering evocation of Herakles. This sequence uses mime and physical performance to evoke a sort of macho pointlessness to the Twelve Labours; without saying a word, Berry’s physicality here conveys a lot about the character. This is a Herakles who can perform amazing feats – and doesn’t he just know it? It’s a compelling and lightly comical vignette, which stays just on the right side of absurdity.

While Atlas might be described as a dynamic performance, with Pickard, Lauzon and Berry moving seamlessly on and off the stage, interacting with the props and switching physical styles without missing a beat, it’s also a performance that makes powerful use of stasis as well.

The moment when Atlas is commanded to lift the cosmos and hold it for eternity is evoked through Lauzon lifting the circular mirror (previously used to lay out the plastic toys of Pickard’s introduction) above her head. The stance Lauzon adopts and the effort apparent in raising the mirror above her head, followed by a breath-holding moment as she locks her arms and stands stock still to keep the weight in the air, is impressive. As the mirror – the ‘cosmos’ – slowly weighs her down, gradually forcing her into a crouch before she adopts the pose we might be familiar with from art and sculpture.

The sequence is almost visceral, and Lauzon’s performance not only encourages the audience to ‘feel’ the weight pressing down on Atlas, but also to emphasize – in a very physical way – with both the pain and the resignation as the titan accepts the punishment.

And this is something that continues throughout the piece. Lauzon offers us a very human Atlas. Again, without using any words, the physical performance conveys character, and the audience is tacitly encouraged to imagine the human emotions that might be accompany such a super-human (or inhuman) burden.

That said, while Lauzon and Berry evoke mythological figures through wordless physical performance, there are words here. Pickard’s narration continues throughout the piece, and the words she speaks offer another dimension to what we are watching.

Although the narration is mainly a continuation of the introductory narration of the classical myth, with Pickard continuing the intimate and gentle style of the opening sequence, another story emerges through interjections and asides. And this bit was something of a (pleasant) surprise.

The other story – and I don’t want to give too much away about this – is told through such light-touch narration that you might almost miss the significance of what’s being said, particularly in the initial interjection from Pickard, as she collects up the weighty sacks and holds them in her arms. The way in which an entire character and backstory is conjured through almost minimal narration is impressive. Pickard actually speaks very few lines of this ‘other’ story, and at one point says only a single, seemingly misplaced word, and yet this opens up a whole other perspective on the Atlas myth and its significance. And, as with Lauzon’s physical performance as the weighed-down Atlas, it subtly encourages an empathetic response in the audience, without offering heavy-handed explanations or directives.

I know I must have overused the words ‘intimacy’ and ‘empathy’ in this review, but these were absolutely my lasting impressions of this performance. The physical performances combine perfectly with the storytelling to share a simple tale with the audience – but, as it transpires, there is more than one story being told here.

I thoroughly enjoyed Atlas. It was an engaging and immersive piece of physical theatre, with three excellent performances and a real charm to the deceptively straightforward storytelling. If you get chance to catch a future performance, this one is a recommendation from me.

Atlas by Oddly Moving was on at The Lowry, Salford, on Tuesday 8th March, as part of a UK tour. For more information, and for future tour dates, please visit the Turtle Key Arts website.