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Consider the Cat Posted
It isn’t often that one gets to feel as though one has somehow slipped into an alternate dimension, but that is the gift of the Moscow Cat Theatre. Less of a theatre piece than a more-surreal-than-usual circus, the show features (as per their website) “20 cats, 2 dogs, and 8 clowns.” The main clown is Yuri Kuklachev, a veteran Russian circus performer who created the show 30 years ago and has since rounded up a bunch of odd awards and honours, including a postage stamp and a chapter in a French grammar book.
He and his fellow clowns (who include his son, Dimitri, and his wife Elena) lure the cats out to do all kinds of bizarre things, like ride in little cat-sized cars, walk across the kitty equivalent of a tightrope (sometimes upside down!), and climb up very high poles. They also, alarmingly, swing the cats around quite a lot, but the furry guys (who are undeniably really freaking adorable) don’t seem to mind.
To describe it here, it all sounds straightforward enough, but rest assured that this was the weirdest theatre experience we’ve ever had (and we saw Barbarella: Das Sexy Space Musical in Vienna. In German.) To begin with, Ticketmaster lost our tickets, but the box office and ushering staff didn’t seem to think this was a problem and encouraged us to guess where we were sitting (which, unfortunately, led to us being kicked out of four different seats by people who actually had their tickets). The resulting aura of confusion and otherworldliness, however, turned out to be the perfect starting point for the strangeness that was about to happen on stage.
Jazzed up midi files (seriously) of Russian folk and classical music (including occasional bursts of Tchaikovsky) blare out of the speakers throughout and there is a vague storyline featuring a toystore, a magic (maybe?) paintbrush, and dream sequence with cat-eating aliens. The main appeal is in how cute the kitties are, and how funny it is to see them scramble up poles. There is also one cat, a gorgeous Himalayan, who spends the majority of the show sleeping up on a ledge towards the back of the stage. Cute as it all is, though, it can’t help but be a bit unsettling – cats just aren’t supposed to DO all that (except for the sleeping at the back of the stage). They look calm and happy enough, and are certainly very well-cared-for but…we could never quite quiet our inner voice girlishly shrieking “poor kitties!”
Image from Theatre Mania