Good fun today, went to watch the show at the local Kathakali Arts Centre which basically involves a lot of saucepan-banging, makeup, and the use of hand/finger gestures rather than speech. Rather than tediously detail the show, I’ll just jump straight into the pictures and give you the jist:

The curtain raises and, ooooooh, who’s this fella standing behind the curtain?

 

Nice look. Anyway, that cheery old blurred thing on the right-hand side of the stage is the object of his paper-plate-chinned affection:

The naughty green dude chases her around the stage dancing and making Chewbacca noises before eventually taking things too far and violating her through the medium of finger gestures. She runs off distraught, the curtain falls and the stage is cleared. Who will come to save her in her time of great need?

Why! It’s Captain Jack Sparra’!

He does a little Flamenco dance to demostrate his desire to reclaim her honour and defend her from further attacks:

But she’s not convinced

Aaaanyway – to cut 2 long hours of finger-acting and saucepan-banging short, the curtain once more is raised and then left lowered on top of a body prone on the floor. Mmmmm, sexy time!

But of course, it’s Cap’n Jack with a knife – take that you horrible green bastard!

And that! Bleurrrrrrrrgh:

Blood keeps pouring out of green fella’s face, there’s much dancing and hand gesturing to celebrate and then, The End! Best Christmas panto ever.

It was great though in amongst all the unfathomable stuff. The guy you can just about make out in the back of some of the photos sang this awesome, wailing music for about 2 hours non-stop and the death scene was actually very good. Underlaying the singer you had this sort of droning, 4 note harmonium track running over and over again for the whole performance and it was quite unnerving when the drums faded out, the singer actually stopped singing and you were just left with this white noise repeating over and over while a gigantic alien bled to death through it’s mouth in front of you.

More!