“Dimanche”
Compagnie Focus & Chaliwaté - Dimanche © Mihaela Bodlovic
My Theatre Confidences 🤫
“Dimanche”
Peacock Theatre (Part of Mime Festival)
London’s Peacock Theatre is the latest stop on Dimanche’s European tour—a show that turns climate catastrophe into absurd, deeply human spectacle. The Belgian theatre collectives Chaliwaté and Focus strip away statistics and slogans, offering instead a surreal, darkly comic vision of a world unraveling in slow motion. No speeches, no villains—just ordinary people carrying on as if nothing is happening while the walls around them collapse.
A family clings to their Sunday rituals—filming home videos, setting the table, bickering over trivialities—while hurricanes rage and floodwaters creep in. Elsewhere, a nature documentary crew chases footage of a vanishing world, but their expedition descends into its own tragicomic struggle against forces beyond their control. Their fates are different, but the message is the same: awareness is not action, and recognition is not rescue.
The show’s magic lies in its physical poetry. Extraordinary mime, puppetry, and ingenious stagecraft transform the stage—ice caps melt under hot lights, paper birds flutter in artificial winds, a fish gasps for air in a shrinking puddle.
Compagnie Focus & Chaliwaté - Dimanche © Mihaela Bodlovic
Dimanche is more than clever staging; it is a chilling study of human denial. The family’s quiet persistence—filming home videos, setting the table as storms rage—mirrors our own delusion. We know disaster is unfolding, yet we book holidays, upgrade appliances, and debate house prices as if nothing is happening. Even the documentary crew, seemingly more aware, are no heroes—just desperate witnesses, capturing the last flickers of a world slipping away.
This is theatre as a distorted mirror, sharpening the absurdity of our inertia. No villains, no moralizing—just a slow, inexorable descent into catastrophe, punctuated by moments of humor and tenderness that make it all the more devastating.
Unlike grand dystopian narratives, Dimanche thrives in the small and surreal—a teetering dining table, an ice block melting under hot stage lights, a lonely puppet penguin. These images linger, more potent than any statistic. Perhaps that is theatre’s role in the age of climate anxiety—not to preach, but to make us feel the quiet horror of pretending we are not already in the storm.
Compagnie Focus & Chaliwaté - Dimanche © Mihaela Bodlovic
A quick note on my reflections on the shows I see:
Let’s be clear: you won’t find the typical “review” on my page. I don’t buy into the so-called objectivity of mainstream theatre criticism; it’s outdated and protects toxic power structures while sidelining marginalised voices. I’m not objective, and I’m proud of it. I’ve got my own lenses. My reflections are personal, shaped by my lived experiences and values. I share what moved me, what challenged me, and what’s worth talking about; not ticking boxes or handing out stars.
And no, I’m not going to describe the whole plot or list every onstage moment; I find that mind-numbingly boring, both to write and to read.
Giuliano x
My Way of Looking at Theatre
You know, the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that traditional theatre criticism has often been a tool for maintaining existing power structures.
It’s time to drop the privileged fancy talk around theatre and break free from star ratings.
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