Kellerman

The design of Keller­man, by Imit­at­ing the Dog has drawn heav­ily on ref­er­ences from the cinema and from the graphic novel – the extremely clever split-level set design frames scenes in a sim­ilar way to pan­els on a com­ics’ page, and the use of front and back pro­jec­tion and a revolving stage recalls spe­cific cine­matic trick shots — the 360° pan around the action, for example. Visu­ally, it is very clever indeed.

How­ever, it is also claus­tro­phobic. In some ways that’s good — it echoes the story of Dr Keller­man – a phys­i­cist incar­cer­ated in a men­tal insti­tu­tion who has lost his wife and child– but whose psy­cho­lo­gist insists they are merely delu­sions. Slip­ping back and for­ward through time, he attempts to bring them back in his future by chan­ging the past.

How­ever, the claus­tro­pho­bia and clev­erness show up the faults in this dense plot too. All the action has been pre-shot, anim­ated and is back-projected onto the set, with the act­ors, in the main, merely mim­icing what they have already recor­ded. Because of this, there is no room to grow, no room left to inter­pret. The piece is fixed. This may be an inten­ded com­ment­ary on Dr. Kellerman’s future, but some­how I doubt it was meant that way.