Bubbling at the Camden Fringe – review: ‘packed with echoes of Sartre and Beckett’

Navigating new territory: Bodies for Rent. Photograph: Bodies For Rent Theatre Company

If contemplation of the meaning of life is your thing, then you could do worse than get yourself to see Bubbling at the Hen and Chickens Theatre.

Part of the Camden Fringe, this experimental drama by Bodies for Rent is packed with echoes of Sartre and Beckett. Featuring two women (Lorraine Yu and Siyu Chen) trying to reach beyond their inner worlds to emotional intimacy, the universal existential predicament is represented with the help of a male puppet (Timotheus Widmer).

For strangers in a foreign land, one’s own thoughts become a world of their own, carried around as one navigates new territory.

Covid gave many of us an analogous experience of alienation and an opportunity to gaze at length into the bubbles of our consciousnesses.

Returning to the realm of human relations has not always been straightforward, as it has brought to the surface eternal questions: How do others see us? How can we genuinely communicate with those around us? What is real and what is a projection of our imaginations?

Written and directed by Belle Bao and Jiazheng Li, the play is not for those whose taste tends to the fast-paced and action-filled, but it offers an opportunity to ruminate on philosophical questions that haunt us all.

Bubbling
Until 22 August 2023
Hen and Chickens Theatre Bar
109 St Pauls’ Road
Islington
N1 2NA