Race Horse Company
Petit Mal
@Nuffield Theatre, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Lighthouse, Eden Court
31 May – 2 June, 4-6 June, 8 June, 15-16 June

Petit Mal is more exciting than South Africa V Uruguay. It is an anarchic cocktail of choreographed insanity that sticks two fingers up to health and safety. It reads Lewis Carol and watches Scrapheap Challenge. It is reasonable family entertainment spoiling for a fight. 

Petri Tuominen is sullen, belligerent, ape-like and has a personal grudge. Rauli Kosonen is either like a feather or A.A. Milne’s Tigger; he is disconcertingly seductive (when in horse form), the ultimate Michelin Man, and destined for a successful career in gay cabaret. Kalle Lehto is underconsidered, but considered rangey.

All three are self-absorbed and brooding,  playful and competitive and menacing and confrontational. They are street-wise dudes and also school boys. They are masculine, masculine, masculine.

So: kill for a ticket.

*************** <– 15 Stars.

Reviewed by Lyn Gardner, Donald Hutera, Simon Cole, PB, Naima Khan, Terry O’Donovan, David Penrose & Jenny Macfie

[Note that: if you are now kicking yourself for missing a 15-star tour de force, Petit Mal is coming back for a longer UK tour next year. You can excuse yourself the burden of remembering this by signing up to the COL newsletter.]

It’s the morning of a beautiful day. Ugly buildings standing sharp against the blue sky; reflected light firing across lines of windows. I am on the Southbank, somewhere in the tangled middle of a daydream in which I micromanage the rebranding of Peter Andre as ‘P. Andre’ (for his new rap career), walking to London Studios for the rehearsals and shoot of an episode of Channel 4’s new 5 O’Clock Show—specifically the Friday episode, on which members of Finnish Race Horse Company will be teaching host Peter Andre the rudiments of acrobatic ball.

Peter is known in Finland, it turns out. Not for any recent personal/public traumas or reality television appearances or death rumours (exaggerated), but for his retrospectively inexplicable chart-run through the early half of the 1990s, the image of him emerging shirtless from the sea a strangely enduring memory for anyone now passing through their twenties and with a childhood in an EU state. Race Horse knew who he was, and immediately hit up YouTube when the possibility of going on his show was floated. It was funny to them and to anyone who heard; the company like dissonant situations and scenes, and there was a lot of friction just from imagining it: Petri Tuominen, Rauli Kosonen and Kalle Lehto, a trio who in performance (and out of it) alternate between a sort of sullen, gang-like insularity and flights of giddy and uncontrolled overstimulation, who are not just unconcerned with the projection of a market image but seemingly oblivious to the need for one, who strongly project the attitude of independence and extreme unconcern which is usually called cool—these three on stage with an airbrushed former pop star in a cheery daytime TV segment meant for desperate purposeless celebrities, hosts of other C4 shows, sportsmen angling to become broadcasters, current airbrushed low-grade pop stars, self-promotionists and soap actors. Myself I have been looking forward to it immensely.

But outside London Studios, the company don’t look so happy. Rauli especially is distracted and glum. Ordinarily he is both the most well-mannered (the one you would rely on; the one your mother would like best) and the live wire among the group: the one who in the company’s street show, Rusty Road Circus, paces angrily back and forth roaring and blustering in half a dozen pigeon languages and grammelots like a transnational amalgam of the greatest circus barkers, wrestlers and mountebanks of all time. Today he is muted, and explains that performing at the Nuffield Theatre last night he injured his ankle. As often happens in circus, it wasn’t from doing trampoline or ground acrobatics or teeterboard or any of the other dangerous skills in the show—he just stepped backward and put all his weight on the side of his foot. The ankle’s been injured before and then the company ended up cancelling a show; this time it’s perhaps not so bad, but it’s early to tell. As we go inside members of Crying Out Loud are talking to one of the show producers, trying to get a physio for Rauli, trying to get a good one. In the meantime there are rehearsals to run.

A television studio is amazing. You don’t ever see it from the film; the camerawork cuts the sides and the lights obscure the roof. What you get on screen is just the set, which in this instance is a red floor and blue sponge-mottled walls (thin, flimsy) punched with various-size circular holes that have then been covered over with sheets of transparent coloured plastic. The largest cutout is the entranceway, backed with a web of lights affixed to steel concentric circles, and fronted by a three-stair staircase for guests to jauntily descend. Pillars (not load-bearing, made from plastic, lit from within) line the walls, and off to one side is the presenting desk and a velvety red chair for interviewees. PETER is spelled out in giant letters on a wire frame above the desk and there’s bunting everywhere, like it’s his surprise party.

Looking around, I can only imagine that all sets are less interesting than the guts of the buildings they rest in. The studio isn’t cluttered, but every space around the stage is used: thick cable snaking over the floor and coiled on the walls; soundproofing; crowds of ground lights; four big cameras on wheeled pneumatic platforms to be lifted up and down and tracked around; another camera fixed to the arm of a counterweighted crane; attractive control panels with names like STUDIO 8 WALLBOX 322 and flick-switches like a pilot’s dashboard and plugs covered over by circular hinged caps. The ceiling is beautiful, a hanging garden of lights, some of them on fixed poles, others on articulable armatures, one (pinned with a DO NOT USE sign) hanging from a sort of accordion lattice that doesn’t look stable, safe or functional. Directly over the stage there’s a cluster of newer models, quite small, the main body of the light rectangular but bulbous, like the abdomen of a beetle or arachnid, and each one set within a cradle that allows it to be directed by remote control. As I watch, someone, somewhere switches them on. They come to life, wheeling round in a flock, the lens of each light unmistakeably now an eye, moving as though seeking, clicking and humming with synthetic intelligence.

Race Horse are sitting below, onstage, getting briefed by one of the scores of producers who seem mostly to have business anywhere but the studio, passing through it on diagonal courses with clipboards (everyone has a clipboard), purposeful and harried. The original plan was that the company would teach Peter Andre a trick on acrobatic ball (which is basically a Swiss ball) before filming so that he could execute it spontaneously to great shock and adulation. But at some point this has fallen by the wayside, and the producers now want two performances: Rauli opening the show on the larger ball, and Petri and Kalle starting the second half on two smaller ones. The company shrug. Perhaps there is a schedule and a plan, broken apart and distributed among the hundreds of clipboards, but it seems like the show is being constructed this morning around us. The set is criss-crossed by workmen putting finishing touches to the walls. The highest ranked producer is talking via headset with an invisible authority who is mostly displeased. Nobody is screaming, no one is crying; there’s a feeling that neither of these things would be unusual for the environment.

Rauli runs his routine a couple times, a little tentatively, landing the dismount on his one good foot, and at the behest of the producers makes it shorter, which is to say even shorter, and ends with a backward roll somersault that will push the ball over to the presenting desk as Peter makes his entrance. This is judged good enough; it’s ticked off somebody’s clipboard. Stage activity intensifies, and as banjo music floats in from off-set (courtesy of Woody the One Man Band, another of the programme’s guests) it starts to feel like a clownish skit about 30 people changing a lightbulb. One girl deposits a small pile (perhaps horde) of sweets on the ledge of one of the big cameras, puts a tick on her clipboard. I keep overhearing things:
‘I’ve never seen anyone actually solve the problem of the wobbly head.’
‘I tell you what: if he stands up we’re in trouble.’
Breathless, also forceful: ‘The headbands are coming in by courier.‘
‘Lunch time yesterday I seriously thought this was it—the end of all our careers. Regardless of the ratings.’
‘I’m too tired already.’

Slouching at the back of the stage Race Horse Company are mirrored by three members of the tech team grouped at the front, who in comparison with the producing caste are relaxed and amused, playing around using the Race Horse leafblower to upraise each other’s shirts M. Monroe-style. When one of the older-model ceiling lights needs to be adjusted/rotated/activated this is done by one of the team using just a hook on a long pole (which is hung on brackets on the wall when not in use, prominently, in the manner of a musket or ornamental sword). In everything they do you can sense their detachment from the show: their career does not depend on it.

As the tech guys busy themselves using the leafblower to try and dislodge various people’s hats, a small rush of low talk runs through the studio: Peter has arrived. Headset producer is superseded by the appearance of another, superior producer (I label them as greater and lesser producers, and as they share a forced joke make far-reaching assumptions about the strong constant hatred they feel for one another). They do a run-through of the interview sections with Peter reading off the autocue and the greater producer taking the sofa seat, fluidly pretending to be a female television presenter, a neurotic comedian, and a daytime soap star. There’s something queasy and discomfiting about his unfaltering confidence in the roleplay, and you can imagine the people whose personalities he is assuming pausing on their way to the studio or perhaps shuddering or brushing something invisible off their skin. Every now and then the producer stops the interview to make a change on the script, or to establish a contingency against an unexpected answer. Working out the expected flow of a conversation with Danny Wallace (the Yes Man), the producer is adamant that they need a ‘worst possible outcome’ scenario for when Peter asks the question ‘Will you wipe my shoes?’.

Changes are made. Peter rehearses with Woody the One Man Band for a section where he and a guest try out one-man-banding, a minion producer taking the place of the guest, Peter gamely chasing a hands-free harmonica that keeps falling forward, looking like he is trying to eat something tricky with chopsticks. This is judged good enough, also. Two clear sacks of wellington boots and several cardboard lecterns, one of which is piled high with Yorkshire puddings, are brought on then taken off, never returned, never explained. Everyone is calling Race Horse Company Petite Mal, which then gets semi-corrected to Petit Mal, which then gets changed to Petty Mal on the autocue at Peter’s request. He is sheepish about this. Rehearsals end. We’re sent away while they bring the audience in.

A C4 dressing room is like a hair salon: bright and long and low, heavily AC-ed; there are mirrors all around the walls and on wheeled frames, countertops and sinks, branded towels stacked on the successive shelves of a three-shelf trolley, steel and black leather chairs. The floor is sheeted linoleum.

In the shorter leg of the room’s L plan, Kalle is wearing circumaural headphones and breakdancing in front of one of the wall mirrors. The only noise is some bass leakage and the squeak of his shoes, plus heavy breathing: it’s both like and unlike his solo dance in Petit Mal, which is performed on a miked-up board of wood so that as his head scrapes the floor it sounds like the first waking movements of a stone giant. He has tied his hair handsomely in a samurai-style topknot, and looks calm and happy and in his element, like a swimmer slipped back in the water.

Around the corner, Rauli is lying out on one of the salon sofas and getting his foot strapped by a health care professional, the tape going round the ankle and under the heel to prevent lateral movement. What happens when you stretch your ligaments, the guy is explaining, is that it affects your proprioception—your ability to know where parts of your body are in relation to other parts—and when you think that your foot is level and in-line it can actually have drifted out to the side on the extra rein of those stretched ligaments, ready for you to go over it again and tear the tissues further. This problem is especially keen for a trampolinist, but with the ankle taped it’s impossible for Rauli to re-injure, and, the guy is saying, it’s only a matter of pain and endurance. Right after filiming, Race Horse are meant to be packing up and heading back for their last performance in Nuffield, but it’s up to Rauli to decide whether or not he wants to cancel. He is limping heavily around the dressing room when one of the producers comes in and says it’s time to go on.

I’ve never been to a TV shoot before. Why haven’t the lights gone down? I can see myself, and I can see the audience sloping down in front of me: perms; bottle dyes; a couple mother-daughters united by their love of Peter Andre (I know because they shout it); men in high-collar polo shirts; sweat-patched, corpulent heavy-breathers; humans of the future. One woman is wearing a see-through top where you really don’t want to see through, but feel drawn to, anyway. Sections of the audience appear as orchards that grow hoop earrings. On stage Rauli is standing balanced on the ball, waiting, looking glum and distracted, still. Ahead of the seating and before the stage the lesser producer raises his hands over his head, high, to signal and then to lead us in applause: the show is starting.

The crane swoops in, music kicks, and Rauli falls onto the ball to give a sharp and aggressive performance, untainted by injury. It’s only 30 seconds long; the producer tries to make us clap in time with the music, but it’s too fast and changeable and it ends up just a continuous low rattle, slightly uncomfortable, that intensifies as the show theme plays and Peter walks in. As rehearsed, Rauli does the high arching somersault to push the ball over to our host. He seems fine landing it, but when Peter rolls the ball back, Rauli stops it by punching it down quite a lot harder than he strictly needs to.

The cameras don’t see. The show has begun.

The first guest is Carol McGiffin, famous for being wedlocked to Chris Evans for 7 years, then more recently for being a co-host on ITV Lifestyle production Loose Women. She has an autobiography out, Oh, Carol! (subtitle: life, love and telling it like it is), which Peter retrieves from his hidden cache of show props and plants squarely on the desk for a lingering close-up. Subsequent conversation ranges widely over subjects of: Carol’s larcenous childhood; her first appearance on Loose Women and the little-known inner workings of the show; banging parties she and Peter have jointly attended; her fiancé’s reaction to the dark/salacious stretches of the autobiography; and her historic victory in a Reggae dance contest (refusing though to bust a move when Calypso music pipes in, and in spite of the combined exhortations of Peter and audience).

Carol’s book also apparently contains a reference to harmonicas, clearing the way magnificently for Woody to make his appearance—out of the web of light and down the stairs playing what could be a sophisticated mash-up of Tambourine Man and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Passacaglia, or something else entirely, I don’t know. There’s barely time for an introduction before Carol and Peter are out getting suited up with their own instruments by the members of the racehorsesque tech team, Carol pretending that the small drum that hangs from her shoulders and over her back is so heavy that it will pull her on her arse (I am unable to stop myself from thinking that she is a bad mime), the audience laughing constantly. Peter asks, What song should they play? A girl in front of me whispers longingly, Nobody Knows, but at any rate nobody hears and Peter shoots down McGiffin’s suggestion of One Man Band to steer us to the scripted outcome: Oh Carol. They play, terribly, as the audience cheers and whoops. Rauli is just visible off-set, appalled. It goes to a commercial break.

Already I have learned to dread these as they are the wretched domain of the Jim Davidsonesque audience fluffer, whose job appears to be to fill in any dead time by working the front rows of the audience with comments on the flowing abundance of their jewellery/cleavage, searching personal questions about Greatest Acts of Theft (in Woolworths), conspirational male-specific asides on urinal anxiety (so true), jokes about sexy calendars and the Chuckle Brothers, etcetera, etcetera. A riff on defecation is memorably awful, and very long, going wrong from the start, going on anyway. Finnish producer Maija sitting next to me is baffled and wants to know what he is talking about and whether she is translating wrong? No. No. There is nothing to translate.

The break ends. Petty Mal return. This time it’s Petri and Kalle, who perform an abbreviated and makeshift double performance on the smaller Swiss balls—not their discipline really and not what they prepared (this slot was originally going to be teeterboard on the company’s own version of the apparatus—a plank fed through a tyre on top of another tyre—with the show producers planning a skit employing a dummy and a jump cut where Peter comes on for a go and is sent flying madly through the air, reappearing dishevelled from behind his presenting desk). It goes OK, considering. It doesn’t look as good as Rauli’s routine, and they end short, clearly before they’re meant to, just standing at the back of the stage next to the balls as though these are horses they have lately dismounted. Petri appears, as so often, privately amused; Kalle raises a single eyebrow, slightly, his signature finish.

The show rolls on. Peter Andre is a nice man who is always in danger of drowning. His guest Danny Wallace is affable in the face of this. He delivers a series of mild anecdotes about social discomfort which you imagine will be exceeded entirely by the eventual retelling of this very television appearance, especially as he is dragged centrestage for the programme’s finale: egg roulette.

Summertime… fairs… World Egg Championships 2006… like everything else the provenance is only alluded to. Perhaps there is more information on the website? All we know is that egg roulette is like Russian roulette but with drastically lower stakes: two contestants sit facing each other across a table and take it in turns to pick an egg from a box and smash it on their forehead. The danger? Some of the eggs are hardboiled, some are raw. Also you might have an allergy. Or be wearing an excellent dress? Beware! The first person to smash a raw egg on their face is of course the loser, and after a warm-up battle in which Danny Wallace defeats Hollyoaks ‘hunk’ Ricky Whittle, it’s on to the main billing: Peter himself in the chair, matched against an elderly lady called Joyce. Joyce is not introduced; it seems we are meant to know her. Is she a recurring character? An audience member? Not for the first time, I feel like I’ve missed something, but I don’t think I have. Joyce and Peter are wearing goggles and transparent plastic macs which have almost certainly been bought specially for egg roulette and perhaps couriered in. The two are eyeballing each other through their goggles; the music is Wild West, I think Ennio Morricone. Tension builds, then discharges. The first eggs are duds. Both players are into it, the intensity of the battle, which means it’s taking longer than it should between rounds, and also that Peter can’t see the lesser producer, who’s wheeling his hand in big frantic circles to indicate there is no time remaining, moving to different areas of the set to try and get his attention. It’s not working. Peter is locked in his showdown; everything outside the arena of competition is darkness and wind. Eggs three and four are braved and survived. Joyce is especially vigorous in driving her egg onto her forehead; when she does it it is almost angry, like a gesture of remembered forgetfulness. I don’t know the probability but it seems improbable: eggs five and six are hard. I am watching the producer crouching and shifting between cameras and mouthing uselessly, thinking that this is the segment for which they should have designed a worst case scenario. I want it to end and at the same time could watch forever, but the fourth round brings relief. Joyce is the loser.

Mostly I am disappointed that Race Horse weren’t co-opted for the game, but as the audience are led in a last ditch effort of applause I realise they’ve disappeared: back to the dressing room to pack up the equipment ready to drive to Nuffield for the night’s performance. I catch them afterward, and they say that as artists they’re not happy doing this: showing themselves at less than their best. I think they feel used and wrung out, but that’s how it goes.

Part of it is that Race Horse aren’t used to doing publicity. In Helsinki I filmed the demo that Channel 4 needed to see before inviting them on the show, which was Rauli teaching the director of Circus Helsinki acrobatic ball while pretending she was Peter Andre—a strange and funny three minutes of video that ended with Rauli holding the ball aloft doing the Mysterious Girl dance. They don’t like selling themselves. Also in Helsinki I did an unsuccessful and quickly aborted video interview with them where I asked why people should come and see their show, and there was just a dead, blank silence for about a minute. Afterward, off-camera, Petri said: ‘I guess the Finnish answer to that is you don’t have to.’

It’s time to leave. The company agree that their day in television was awful. Rauli decides to go to Nuffield and perform on the ankle. The show is still great. You can see it, but you don’t have to. It’s the afternoon of a beautiful day.

* * *

You can watch Race Horse on the 5 O’Clock Show on the C4 website for the next 24 days, although ask yourself first if you truly want to. Petit Mal is at Eden Court, Inverness 15 & 16 June.