Review by Simon Jenner, March 1st 2025
This is the third show in a year I’ve seen set in a public toilet. Sam Grabiner’s Boys on the Verge of Tears at Soho had 40 characters, Harry McDonald’s Foam at the Finborough less: but Riccardo Pippa’s and Teatro dei Gordi’s Pandora at the Coronet till March 2nd is definitely 50 Characters in Search of a Toilet. I counted: six actors stride or shamble on, gyrate, twirl, strip or scream. This is first-rank physical theatre and a tonic to the genre.
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
Last time Teatro dei Gordi came to The Coronet in 2023 with Sulla Morte Senza Esagerare it was a sell-out. Pandora takes the farce-paced genre to a kind of intersectional ante-room. All 50 characters pass through to pass something and move on. But it’s not always what you’d expect, unless of course you observe public toilets up close. And we’ve seen instances of that, most notably in Grabiner’s more ‘serious’ work. But farce carries tears too, and the prospect of someone whose head is wholly covered in hair wailing “Ali” down plugholes isn’t funny at all, though farce. Pandora as it implies opens more than the verge of tears, and if characters don’t laugh, they sing. They foam too.
What Pippa and Teatro dei Gordi explore then flout are boundaries: how an agreed space, both liminal and a place of intimate bodily functions experienced alone is constructed of a membrane of civic observance, fragile protocol, accepted norms. There’s transgressions of course, assignations. But these (as indeed the Grabiner and McDonald plays make plain) are carried on under the ritual of agreed protocols. The silence isn’t that of the Sistine Chapel. But it’s close.
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
How to pierce that membrane, punch through it, monster yourself? Six actors – Claudia Caldarano, Cecilia Campani, Giovanni Longhin, Andrea Panigatti, Sandro Pivotti, Mateo Vitanza – meld and multi-role. In just one scene all six perform. This, involving nudity and an unforgettable pants-down singalong conducted by another, but involving the women in add-ons, is one of the two great set-pieces of the hour-long show. The other involves a man plugging in his mic and sound system to the dryer, singing to another man; only to be joined in a croon de theatre.
Farce is circular too. Cue the first minutely detailed, fanatically observed scene of a man desperate to cleanse himself straight out of Covid 19. It ends in his dropping his spectacles in the bin and being unable to retrieve them, according to his terrified tenets. We know that’s not over.
He’s followed by everything impossible. A man on stilts enters, with obvious challenges, there’s two men (seemingly chef and sous-chef) with some strange white substance smeared on doors and on each other. People emerge from cubicles or disappear, never to be seen again. As one man retrieves the trousers of a cubicle-bound man, washes them and uses a dryer.
That dryer gets a workout on the Coronet stage with Anna Maddalena Cingi’s relatively verismo set with working toilet props. Pablo Casati’s lighting is mostly a throbbing pleasant luminosity When it isn’t it’s startling and moving. Luca de Marinis supplies more than urinal whooshes and tinkles, as Pandora is an occasionally musical experience. The outlandish and ordinary costumes Ilaria Ariemmme has dreamed up include an elephant man with a cotton identity crisis trying to fight his way out of a head, ancient and other face, wigs, garish costumes. Ariemme’s masks are like wedding cakes left out in the rain. One tops an old man: who incontinently sprays every urinal with the virulence of a tom cat. Someone commented he looked unnervingly like Jimmy Saville.
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
Two memorable set-scenes involve the space being invaded by an ongoing narrative of which we see the snapshot. True of all of these, but especially of the man entering with another man clutching his trousers begging him for a reprieve of an unknown (possibly employee) nature, as a woman accompanies, taking notes. Another involves a woman stripping to daub her upper body in “Ceci est politcale” but can’t draw all of it. Enter a fellow protester with a megaphone, who in true comradely style without demur duly obliges with an exclamation mark up her spine.
A transvestite changing into male attire has forgotten male shoes: he outstares a machismo passer-by. Such moments challenge the chapel. Others slap it. A tellingly cumulative moment is signalled after a man emits a howl, affronting a woman. She then drops her posh fashion shopping, upends herself and screams into the largest bag. Collecting herself, she flurries off. What we’ve seen is contagious and existential. It’s funny but at bottom (I use the word advisedly here) chilling. Another woman obsessively washes herself, another indulges in a narcissistic blow-dry selfie.
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
The iconic image most will see advertised depicts a dance-competing couple enter: he to vomit in a cubicle, she to relieve herself gymnastically in a urinal.
Some strip discreetly to wash themselves. Some of these we’ve seen ourselves: sometimes (whisper it) we’ve even perpetrated such things. “Please leave as you found me” pleads a notice in English. So it begs questions: what couldn’t we do, if placed outside our own comfort station in life? And what masks do we doff when we do? Essential theatre. Essential questions. A gem.
Technical Manager Alice Colla
Ensemble. Photo Credit: Noemi Ardesi
