Red Bus Londinium Life

Award-winning Spanish theatre company Yllana and Toom Pak are currently performing the UK premiere tour of TRASH! at the Peacock Theatre. Trash! is absolutely Stomp for the next generation. Set in a recycling centre, the workers create percussive magic – and comedy – with waste including propane tanks, umbrellas, balls, toolboxes, horns and bin bags.

TRASH! is created and co-directed by Yllana and Toom Pak. Founded in 1991, Yllana specialises in comedy and physical theatre while Toom Pak specialises in percussion. It comes to the Peacock after a sell-out European tour.

Joyful silliness is at this show’s heart. Audience participation is encouraged, but well-managed, and it is a delightful way to lose oneself in a crowd and find the spirit of your own childhood.

The cast (Aka Thiemele, Bruno Alves, Fran Mark and Gorka Gonzalez) have a physicality that suggests a background both in dance and in clowning. Feats such as throwing and bouncing tyres, balls and umbrellas are extremely well-executed with a seeming ease that belies their difficulty.

I spent my journey home pondering. To play Fur Elise by Beethoven, they must have tuned either the bottles or the hard hats. But how? If it was the identical-looking bottles, how did they get the right ones? It was intriguing and cunning and wonderful. I suspect many households are full of children experimenting with otherwise discarded items today.

Children can be a tough crowd to keep in control and focused. (Trust me, I am a teacher, so I know!) The half term audience of children, parents and grandparents were transfixed, amused and following every instruction with a focus I can only envy.

One missed opportunity here is that it could perhaps have had a clearer eco-message. The recycling centre setting seems to lend itself to this but this was not built upon. The voice-overs explaining the recycling process being gone through were perhaps intended to address this but with their focus on sound did not really do so.

Seeing Stomp all those decades ago, it was surprising and unique. This cannot be said here, if you are an adult, as that is now a well trodden path. But for children – its intended audience – this is a hugely innovative and pleasurable piece of theatre. For the adults coming along for the ride, there is lots to enjoy, too.