Review: The Castle Builder, Tobacco Factory Theatres @ Cube

It’s a bit parky in the gloriously faded, red velvety flea-pit that is The Cube, but a ridiculously cheap G&T at the bar soon takes the edge off the chill. Vic Llewellyn and Kid Carpet are wandering about the stage greeting people, surrounded by stuff in plastic bags, wobbly camping tables and a bank of old-school electronic gear playing a backing track that sounds like a crackly wireless wandering between stations.

They don plastic Viking hats with horns, and then Lewellyn suddenly produces a hatchet and manically chops a wooden chair to bits, Berserker-style. No expense is spared in this show – a whole chair is ritually sacrificed each night and its remains lovingly up-cycled into a gorgeous piece of folk art during the course of the show by an on-stage ‘maker’.

What ensues – stories, slides and footage of ‘outsider’ artists and their mind-bending constructions, interspersed with songs – is deeply touching, wonder-inducing, funny and sad, all at the same time. The title of the show is inspired by one Olav, inmate of a Norwegian psychiatric institution who, over the course of many years, secretly dismantled the standing stones of a Viking burial site and used them to build a gigantic castle on the edge of a cliff.

Vic and Kid go on to introduce us to other outsider artists, including a blind wood sculptor, a compulsive mosaic man, a French postman who spent 33 years building a turreted palace in his back garden, and a singing lady who built curious dwellings out of bottles to house her dolly collection in.

The strengths of this show are (a) that you couldn’t make any of this stuff up in the first place because fact is weirder than fiction, (b) that all the outsider artists featured built their edifices with total conviction and compulsion, and (c) that Vic and Kid are able to retell their stories with matching levels of conviction, compulsion and authenticity.

They gleefully champion the edge-people, the dispossessed, the misunderstood, and the crazy have-a-goers, the strange little different people who are reviled, persecuted, locked-up and marginalised by those who like everyone to be normal and the same. There’s a chilling slide of the Third Reich’s Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition (Olav and his soul-mates would have been on their cleansing list, for sure), which evokes Trump’s recent public mockery of a disabled journalist and the emboldened alt-right’s propensity for scapegoating anyone who is less than WASP.

The Castle Builder is a celebration of otherness, the creative power of madness, and the endless human drive to self-express, made by two people who really mean it. Go and see it, take your friends, take your mobile phone, take jelly babies, feel the love, and when you get home, chop stuff up and make art.

The Castle Builder is at the Cube, Bristol from Tuesday, February 21 until Saturday, February 25 as part of Tobacco Factory Theatres’ Beyond season. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/the-castle-builder

Pic: Jack Offord