At the end of many mask theatre shows, there is a brilliant moment when the actors remove their masks and we’re surprised by the performers behind. When I saw Vamos’s Finding Joy at Jacksons Lane in London in 2014, audience members were audibly astonished and delighted to discover the actors bore so little resemblance to the characters they had played. In mask theatre the old can be young again, while the youthful can play the old. Gender, too, is up for grabs. It’s also an economically advantageous art form: a small company can play many characters.
There is a strange alchemy about mask theatre. The ancient Greeks recognised its power and contemporary audiences seem increasingly drawn to a form that until recently was dismissed as a wee bit fusty. But of course so was puppetry, and that’s certainly not the case in the wake of War Horse .
To be honest, I feel about mask theatre the way I feel about smoked mackerel: I’d never choose it from a menu, but when it’s served I often think I should have it more often.
It’s just as well, because there are a number of mask shows in Edinburgh this summer including Vamos’s Finding Joy at Assembly Hall; the fine German mask company Familie Flöz returning with their 2004 hit, Teatro Delusio, at the Pleasance; and Theatre Témoin, who had a hit with The Fantasist in 2012 and 2013 and are back with a new piece – The Marked, a mask, puppet and physical theatre piece inspired by stories of homelessness – at the Pleasance. Vamos arrive in Edinburgh fresh from a hugely successful tour of a really affecting piece about forced adoption, The Best Thing, which has played to packed audiences.
So what’s the appeal of mask shows? “The audience isn’t handed everything on a plate,” says Vamos’s artistic director Rachael Savage. “They have to watch very carefully and interpret what’s happening – and while they are doing that, it means that there is an easy route open straight to the heart.” Theatre Témoin’s Ailin Conant points to the similarities with puppetry, with the mask a blank slate upon which the audience can project. “Weirdly, although it’s an inanimate object, there’s something very humanising about it,” says Conant, “It creates a much wider emotional register.”
Hajo Schüler of Familie Flöz points out that while the mask is a transmitter like a puppet, “it’s much less evident than a puppet and so can be even more powerful. People genuinely forget there is a performer behind the mask. You need really skilled performers without ego, performers who are prepared to listen to the mask and give it the power. But also performers who don’t think the mask will do the work for them. It won’t. It’s a delicate relationship.”
Savage agrees: “The mask doesn’t hide anything. In fact it magnifies what the actor is doing, good and bad. It requires performers who are skilled at detail and gentleness. You can’t blast the performance out, you have to learn to draw an audience in. It requires real delicacy.”
Mask theatre can tell great, affecting stories, and indeed that was the case in ancient times when it was a tool of tragedy as much as comedy. But in contemporary theatre it is often a way of putting the stories of ordinary people centre stage. Teatro Delusio is a delicious fantasy about the backstage technicians in a theatre; Finding Joy considers family relationships through the prism of dementia and The Marked tells the story of a homeless boy who would probably pass unnoticed in the street. “Mask work can be both fantastical, and grounded in the real world,” says Conant. Savage says that one of its greatest currencies is its ability to give voice to the unheard and the unspoken.
But in less skilled hands, mask theatre often topples over into the sentimental and feels as if it is trying to pluck at the heart strings a little too insistently. All the directors I spoke too recognised that danger and had their own ways of trying to deal with it. Schüler says sentimentality can creep in when actors are working in full mask, work that often eschews text and uses music to a greater extent. Theatre Témoin seldom use mask as their only tool, instead mixing in other forms to create variety of both tone and style, and Savage says that over time she and the company have improved at “cutting the schmaltz”.
“You have to recognise just how powerful mask theatre can be and learn to control it,” she says. “It means as a director and performer, you have to be alert to every tiny detail, every minute change of pace, and you have to keep paring back. It’s such a delicate balance but when mask theatre works audiences love it and respond so directly: straight from the heart.”
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