The King of Taking
King’s and Queen’s Performing Arts Centre
Friday, October 14
REVIEW BY BARBARA FRAME
The king has a gorgeous velvet cloak, a ruff and a crown that looks as though it’s made of paper; he also wears a onesie, socks and slippers.
His tatty-looking throne is so high that it takes him several minutes of high-octane contortions to sit down. Then he spots a table that looks as though it has presents on it.
The trouble is that the table is on a far corner of the stage, and because he’s a king he can’t walk on ordinary flooring, only red carpet. The servants are nowhere to be seen.
So begins Thom Monckton’s The King of Taking. The one-hour show incorporates circus skills, mime, just a few words and some very expressive fairground-style music.
Monckton is amazing to watch, his body seemingly not constrained by the usual restrictions of bones and gravity, his features endlessly mobile and his demeanour more characteristic of a petulant 4-year-old than of a royal personage, and almost certainly owing something to Mr Bean.
Timing is exquisite. Some sequences, though, are just a little bit too long,
The adults loved it, but for this adult the greatest pleasure was listening to the wonder and delight of the audience’s many children, some of them quite small. The king's spontaneous reactions, regal and infantile at the same time, to interjections from the younger set, provided some of the evening’s funniest moments.
The hour-long production is brought to us by the Finland-based Kallo Collective, which specialises in physical, non-verbal theatre, and last night’s performance was the world premiere.
Everyone needs a dose of absurdity now and then, and The King of Taking provides it in bucketfuls. If you go tonight, your enjoyment will be at least doubled if you take a child.
