New Writing SouthTheatre Producers
RUDE MECHANICAL THEATRE COMPANY
The company was founded in 1991 and is led by Pete Talbot, a former teacher, who trained in commedia dell'arte with the maestro Antonio Fava at the Scuola Internazionale dell'Attore Comico in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Their shows - which are inspired by and deeply rooted in the commedia - are for all ages and are performed both indoors and outdoors. The company use only professional physical theatre actors and actor-musicians trained in mime, clown or commedia. Most members of our team are also musicians and perform live.
Their acting style uses large comic and often acrobatic movement and physical jokes called lazzi and burli, much of it part of a tradition which is hundreds of years old, but using Pierrot style white faces rather than masks and brightly coloured vibrant 'cartoon-ised' costumes. The company literally use the slapstick or battoccio, but their work is not 'merely slapstick'. Poetic solutions to storytelling are never far away and through mime, 'sound texturing' and devices of their own they are constantly looking to exploit the poetic, fantastic and absurd. Nor do the company regard themselves as a 'heritage' company - neither English nor Italian. They use tools from the tradition as and when they see fit to produce new work. Fava calls this use of tradition to create contemporary work commedia parodia. That's what Rude Mechanical do.