Umbrella
Organisation

Another favourite show is also a SeaChange co-production, Rimski & Handkerchief’s Wind Up at Home. It’s a musical installation piece, a kind of arty bric-a-brac stall, placed (rather wonderfully, I feel) not in a cobbled backstreet full of quirky run-down shops – and there are a fair few of those in Yarmouth – where it would blend in with its surroundings, but right slap bang in the middle of the most redeveloped part of the town, next to the bus station and the Market Gates shopping centre. It looks magnificently incongruous in its chosen site. We see an open-fronted shoplet bursting to the brim with tattered objects, piled one upon the other, and escaping out onto the pavement. There’s a velvet chaise longue heaped with eiderdowns and cushions, an assortment of chairs and occasional tables of all shapes and sizes, and lamps a-plenty, many with the sort of fringed shades your granny would love. There’s a little wooden rocking horse, rusty Silver Cross prams, well-loved large-horned musical instruments, a gramophone player bearing a miniature band on its turntable, and a wax skull wearing a policeman’s hat. There are hostess trolleys loaded with a crazed assortment of lanterns, tin pots, crockery, and fake flowers – yellow dahlias! – and there are lots of whirring umbrellas of all sizes and colours. And it’s not just the umbrellas – things whir and tick and clunk all over the place. Oh, not to mention the ringing telephones… Meanwhile, a pair of odd looking characters, one male, one female, potter around. He’s in a faded and frayed black suit and battered hat. She’s in a Victorian white cotton playsuit-type undergarment with odd socks, brown brogues, and an equally battered hat sporting fake flowers.

To each side of Rimski’s Yard (as the sign pronounces) are two interesting musical instruments. There’s a piano on bicycle wheels, with a ripped and torn faded pink velvet seat and klaxon horn (the aptly named Bicycle Piano); and there’s a double bass mounted on to a tricycle (the Double Bassicle). A couple of times a day, the installation is augmented by musical performances, Rimski and his ‘partner in rhyme’ Handkerchief taking to their instruments to serenade us. At the start of their final show of the festival, Rimski frantically peddles up and down the pavement whilst playing the old honky tonk, and Handkerchief suddenly pops out of the piano’s top lid. Together, they sing Send in the Clowns (of course they do!) and the Flanagan & Allen classic, Nice People, amongst other treats. Handkerchief also has a brief spell on her double bass… The crowd love them – especially when Rimski veers into the road with his piano and does nothing to avoid an oncoming double-decker that has just turned out from the bus station. Rimski stops, heaving on the great metal handbrake that clunks noisily. The bus driver stops – just in time – and Rimski then slowly, pumping furiously, pedals away to cheers and laughter from the crowd. Meanwhile, the umbrellas whir on, and the installation clunks away in the background. It is all as eccentrically English as you could possibly imagine –installation and performance are a complete delight, both.