Brighton Festival 2025
The Gummy Bears’ Great War
Batisfera
Genre: Contemporary, European Theatre, Installation Theatre
Venue: Brighton Dome
Festival: Brighton Festival
Low Down
All is to play for in Batisfera’s atmospheric and imaginative war-game between sweets and plastic toys. A picaresque satire on nationhood and how wars can start for no particular reason. The Bears are the belligerent aggressors here, their opponents, the dinosaurs, a cynical bureaucracy.
Review
In any international Festival of big, bold work on big, bling stages, it’s sometimes the smaller, intimate shows that capture the imagination and linger in the memory. For me The Melancholy of the Tourist at last year’s Brighton Festival did just that. The same venue now hosts Sardinian company Batisfera’s playful and powerful mini-drama which similarly reveals its power through the detail and precision of its form.
Apple Green, Lemon Yellow, Raspberry Red; their innocently fruity names, translucent form, and of course their diminutive size are surely a disadvantage to the Gummy Bears army. Yet these are a battle-hungry and tenacious lot, declaring war on an enemy they know will annihilate them. The bemused dinosaurs attempt negotiation, but fight they will, and win as they must.
For what we have in Angelo Trafo’s poetically written, elegantly directed play is a picaresque satire on nationhood and how wars can start for no particular reason. The Bears are the belligerent aggressors here, their opponents a cynical bureaucracy. That they will be squashed by human-sized foe doesn’t detract from their hapless mission, its motivation unclear.
Telling this epic story, around a lamp-lit black table, are Valentina Fadda and Leonardo Tomasi, compelling actors and scene shifters. They lovingly move tiny bears into spotlit positions and embody the policy-making dinosaurs, stamping papers about endive production and health care with a laissez-faire disregard for the power they wield. The choreographed movement flows through short scenes – the pair seem to breath in time with each other – giving character to each bear and weight to the thrust of the story. An eclectic selection of music from 1950’s Italian pop to percussive beats adds just the right backing for the narrative.
Action is beautifully paced, framed between sun-rise and the sun-set, voiced in Tino Petilli’s resonant Italian and captioned into English on the desk front, possibly hard to read from the rear seats (sight-lines are not great for this predominantly adult audience). Whilst spare the text is rich and every word counts, every movement is necessary. The Bear army has weapons, one loses his horse – imagine! There’s true pathos as the Apple Greens line up to say goodbye to their homes and friends, to the bank some could never cross. One takes a heart-stopping leap into the void rather than fight. Managing to skewer world politics (Ukraine vs Russia very much in mind) in such a witty, absurd and surprisingly profound way is asking alot of a thirty minute show. As the end-game approaches, Tchaikovsky’s strings soaring, Tomasi’s increasingly operatic delivery bizarrely evokes Henry V’s battle speech. It’s the bitter ending we expected, from the sweetest of shows.
