![Fuerza Bruta's Aven](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000385188150_17206946882660_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Fuerza Bruta: Aven: The Argentinian eccentrics return with a hallucinogenic joy-ride of an evening
The South American troupe is back in Britain with a show that’s part thrill-ride, part theatre-rave
![Fuerza Bruta's Aven](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000385188150_17206946882660_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=680)
They come fresh as April to Britain, where for all the foreign companies that have passed through in the past decade, little seems to have changed and our theatrical highlight is the opening of a venue that apes performances 400 years ago”. So sharply observed a critic hailing the explosive arrival in London of an Argentinian troupe called De Le Guarda in the New Labour-landslide summer of 1997, and contrasting it with Shakespeare’s Globe.
Those who saw the troupe’s show (initially called Periodo Villa Villa), at Three Mills Island in Bromley-by-Bow, later (at the turn of the millennium) at the Roundhouse, were bowled over by the gravity-defying, and description-defying, coups de théâtre. Here was an immersive experience that reached for the stars but felt connected, with its pounding beats, to the earth and a sense of ritual. Small wonder that New York adored it and it encouraged theatre-makers over here to think outside the box. An ensuing show, Fuerza Bruta (Spanish for “brute force”), was adopted as the name for the successor company, which has travelled the world.
Now, after more than a decade away, and coincidentally in the wake of Labour’s return, the devil-may-care outfit (with 14 fresh-faced performers in harness) are back with a new one, Aven. For some, it’s an invitation to nostalgia, for the next generation an eye-opener into how things were, and can be: part thrill-ride, part theatre-rave.
It’s not just my fond memory playing tricks on me, though – there’s less antagonistic kick to this wordless, 70-minute midsummer night’s dream. Where last time, spectators might be grappled aloft, anarchic wildness has been supplanted by kaleidoscopic delight; “I took out all the dark parts of the script,” creator Diqui James says.
As a consequence, we’re more like herded witnesses (up to a thousand-strong) than thronging participants, and there’s less palpitating anticipation as to what will happen next. This is, by their own declaration, “the happiest show on Earth”.
![Fuerza Bruta's Aven](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/theatre/2024/07/11/TELEMMGLPICT000385188160_17206947806180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Even so, an interesting energy of restlessness and agitated yearning persists. In the opening vignettes, following ear-hammering drumming and chanting, four performers grasp, horizontally walk then chase across a giant suspended globe, a smartly attired man becomes a trapped, tumbling figure inside a transparent column akin to a vertical snow globe – and mesmerisingly, a woman cavorts on high in a glass tank, sloshing water, while underneath, as if clinging on for dear life and amorously trying to break through, cleaves a man.
They make difficult stuff look easy, not least the euphoric sight of a woman running through the air courtesy of a rotating crane, though some of the feats – much funky synchronised strutting and bopping – resemble jaunty filler. I’m not complaining about a show that offers enough ticker-tape to herald the end of a world war, and culminates in a ludicrously large inflatable whale veering this way and that, with a gentle mass drenching thrown in for good measure. Still, where once they turned the world upside down, this would now fit entirely comfortably within a tourist trail that takes in ye olde Globe.
Until Sept 1; roundhouse.org.uk