Before an audience of mannequins, scattered here and there amongst empty chairs, an ageless actor and actress, pale and drawn-faced, beam as they receive the ovations of a packed house. Encores and bouquets are the order of the day. Amidst a clamour of fake applause, they retreat to their dressing rooms. From a world cobbled together from next to nothing—makeshift cardboard masks, fairground acts of varying quality, a zany and feignedly childish happening—they engage in rituals that are as liberating as they are derisory, as tragic as they are comic.
