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Phantom Rides Again! review – a grotesque return to the dawn of cinema

Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Good Cop Bad Cop present a wry, playful and genre-defying show based around the work of an early film director

Phantom Rides Again! is the first in what promises to a be a series of retrospective shows by the Cardiff performance company Good Cop Bad Cop. It is based on the 2008 production Phantom Ride, which in turn was inspired by the mostly lost films of south Wales-based director William Haggar. Here his shorts, made between 1902 and 1908, are episodically and gamely retold in the first person by five darkly eyeshadowed, hammer-wielding performers: Good Cop Bad Cop’s Richard Huw Morgan and John Rowley and three collaborators, Sian Owens, Seren Vickers and Jake Walton.

Haggar’s films were popular entertainments from the dawn of the age of mass media, before the establishment of filmic genre. Phantom Rides Again!, like the company’s work in general, occupies similar genre-defying territory. This is wry, smart, performance-making that refuses to become one thing or another, coquettishly flirting – like the flashing of an Edwardian ankle – with the possibility of collapsing into nothing. Partly improvised, the retelling of each film is sometimes playfully contested and interrupted and littered with anachronisms.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2raqNOh
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