Being one of this year’s more esoteric shows, Baldanders defies common description. The nearest pigeon hole is probably “puppet show”. Some of us are scared of puppets. If there ever were puppets to mess you up, these are they.
The basic set-up is one man in a cage, one man out, but really the play is about the demons and the men’s perverse relationships with them. Their identities are ambiguous and their behaviour chaotic; it slowly and cryptically emerges that Baldanders is the trapped one, and he takes many forms.
There’s a lot of trippy banter, tickling the subject of identity. This has a lot to do with teeth, for some reason. It’s hard to imagine how another show, of similarly narrow scope, could possibly be more surreal. After a while you might wonder if it will be revealed to all be happening in the mind of a gibbering lunatic somewhere, or office politics in Hades perhaps.
Baldanders is a triumph of a realized vision but is a victim of its own internal success — it’s so demanding that you can’t just sit back and enjoy it without feeling left out, but also so obscure that if you make the effort to understand it you’ll lose the sense of immersion.
3/5 
Bernie Greenwood
