Dante - Through the Invisible

In our treatment of the ancient spiritual theme of journeying into the underworld in search of enlightenment, we have made a number of contemporary leaps and have taken certain liberties with the structure and characters found in Dante’s original text. The structure of The Divine Comedy with its journey from the dark wood of self-doubt into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise has been retained, but in our production, the three states occur within the same spiritual journey provoked by a particular incident in the life of Joe (the contemporary Dante).

This Dante is no 14th century Florentine but a 20th century soldier groping his way through searchlights and gunfire. His inferno is a battle crazed hallucination, his night of the soul a war-torn nightmare.

The latter part of the performance brings to mind an Hieronymous Bosch painting suddenly come to life.

The space for this literally and metaphorically dark production is cleverly used by sparse but effective lighting, which makes the small stage look at times cavernous. The sound, however, tended to descend into a blanket of rather irritating and overdone squeaks and scratches.

Handspan’s focus is on Hell, a surreal landscape of smoky glowing coals inhabited by primitive and robotic beasts, skeletal birds of prey and snapping jaws.

Such a stripped and single focused reading dilutes Dante’s text. In the real comedy, the poet is protected by his muse Beatrice and avoids such horrors.

Dante is highly polished and visually impressive, but much of the complex and sometimes grotesque imagery left me a little frustrated and unsure as to what it was I was supposed to be looking at. A great deal of it is admittedly symbolic, but symbolic of exactly what seemed to defy even the broadest speculation

There was no sense of the relationships between Dante and the two recurring puppet characters who accompanied him on the journey. The programme explains that these two are his guide: the poet, Virgil; and the love of his life, Beatrice, but they were ill-defined and meaningless as personalities and didn’t move me because I didn’t understand what they meant to Dante.

One should not search for too literal an interpretation of Dante, Handspan's imagery always invokes responses on many levels. And anyone familiar with their work will recognise the sleight of hand, masterful puppetry, tricked lighting and haunting sound.

This is gym for the soul. If we have to go back to the fourteenth century to discover the theatre of the future then thank you Handspan for showing us the way.