Baxter Employing Mime Technique

The recent success of his new play, The Band Rotunda, with its Beckett mime by John Casserley as an introduction, has encouraged playwright James K. Baxter to use the technique again for the second of his trilogy, The Sore-footed Man, which will be staged at the Globe Theatre towards the end of this month. This time, however, the mime has been written by Baxter himself and, coming from the same mind as the play, it should have more sympathy with it.

The technique has been borrowed from the French, and Baxter sees it as a way to express a sense of space on the one hand, and tensions and problems on the other, with the mime helping to release them. ‘The mime is nearer to the dream, which is difficult to convey normally on the stage,’ he says.

The playwright is tremendously impressed with Casserley’s ability at miming, and he feels that this new work, entitled The Axe and the Mirror, will add considerably to the play. ‘I take a strand from the play to project the idea. It doesn’t have to connect logically – it just sets the mood.

‘Mime is a side-road. It just has a particular use here, but I wouldn’t like to devote too much of my time to it. It is something new to me – perhaps I will tire before long.’

The Sore-Footed Man itself has been taken from a Sophocles play. (Baxter emphasises that it is not a translation.) ‘It deals rather with what may be called the difference between the Beat and the Hip. Essentially it is about love and war. The language is more expansive, more lucid than that of The Band Rotunda. It is on an entirely different level – not street language.’

Ian Ralston takes the role of Odysseus, and husband and wife Patric and Rosalie Carey are husband and wife Philoctetes and Eunoe. Peter Clare page 383 portrays Neoptolemus, and there is a chorus of three sailors. The final offering in the trilogy is The Bureaucrat, to be presented later in the year. 1967 (450)