Peeping Tom review: Father is a touching and crazy take on life in old age

Mother (Moeder), the second part of Peeping Tom’s dreamlike family trilogy, was a full-blown surrealist fantasy: blood ran from paintings, nuns broke into song and a woman flirted with a coffee machine.

A year later and the Brussels-based dance-theatre group is back, this time to showcase the first show, Father (Vader), as part of the London International Mime Festival. (The pieces have been seen out of sequence here, though it matters little.) It’s touching, confusing and even a tad exhilarating – if, at times, downright weird.
 
The action takes place in an old folks’ home. There are peach curtains and a piano; red ‘carpet’ covers the stage. But beyond the domestic touches we see smudges on the concrete walls, the grime in a high window. We watch as an elderly man (Leo) is dragged through a door, berated by his son. Reality blurs into fantasy. A manic-eyed carer wants to kill her charges; another pops up in the soup; a piano recital receives a rock-star welcome. There’s song and dance and outright contortion (notably by the supremely bendy Maria Carolina Vieira).

Is Leo mad, or the most normal person in the room? Who knows – it’s hard enough to keep a grip on your own sanity.

Until 2 February, Barbican (020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk)