Faulty
Optic

shows Bubbly Beds

BUBBLY BEDS A beautiful and funny piece of underwater micro-theatre using live-feed video projection, specially composed music, live speech and sound. Mr & Mrs Mundane sit watching TV. They are disturbed by a bell - a distress call from auntie. Donning diving-gear Mr Mundane plunges into the flooded basement encountering the Titanic's lost band, headless dolls in concrete slippers, a supermarket trolley full of gibbering infants etc, before finding auntie in the bath unable to turn the taps off. Meanwhile upstairs Mrs Mundane is experiencing the delights of the plumber who has come to fix the leak. The piece climaxes with the plumber inadvertently saving Mr Mundane from the jaws of death.

'Bubbly Beds' uses simple puppet techniques, enhanced by an unusual medium - water. Modern technology ie video and video-projection enables us to show the action large. The audience is able to watch the action in the aquarium and miniature set as well as on the screen. Audiences have said that it is like watching the making of a film; the action on the screen - selected by the video operator being like the edited version and the action in the aquarium being like the take with onscreen action and offscreen entrances and exits included.

Devised, constructed and performed by Gavin Glover and Liz Walker

Music composed and recorded by Hugh Nankivell.

With Thanks to Martin Smith Automata, Steve Tiplady, Mark Webber, Steve Wright, Alison McGowan, Yvonne Davis, Clipstore, Stuart Blackburn, The Arts Council of England and The British Council.

What the Papers said about Bubbly Beds

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES,

HENSON'S PUPPET FESTIVAL REVIEW (extract)

PETER MARKS. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 1998

It is possible to attend the festival and) leave at home the plagues and sufferings of the real world, as is deliciously demonstrated by -Faulty Optic, a British puppet troupe with a pronounced (and hilarious) weird streak. Its "Bubbly Beds," also at the Public Theater, is like a palm-size Monty Python skit that answers the improbable question, "What's living in the basement with Auntie?" When the man of the house goes down to check out a severe plumbing problem, he slithers into his scuba gear; the basement scenes occur in an aquarium. - (Like Basil Twist's "Symphonie Fantastique," the downtown puppetry hit, Faulty Optic with its underwater world in miniature of working flashlights, oxygen masks, ticking clocks and maiden aunts with the bodies of sturgeons displays nonpareil dexterity in the tank.) And the spooky sense of humor of its creators, Liz Walker and Gavin Glover, is a perfect match for the macabre machinations.