Summary
BALDERDASH And Piffle, as well as being a brilliant TV series that creatively and colourfully dissects language, are ubiquitous and seemingly legitimate means of bamboozlement used by penpushing jobsworths intent on baffling anyone who's ever attempted to fill in a form. When Vaclav Havel wrote this absurd satire on state bureaucracy, power politics and the manipulation of language back in 1965, such semantic sleights of hand were central to the Stalinist state retaining power over the then Czechoslovakia.
Today, as Communicado's new production strongly hints at, with the language of spin increasingly exposed as meaningless, if self- aggrandising, tosh, such abuses of vocabulary have gone global. A yarn concerning the travails of an unnamed institution's departmental head who is manipulated out of office by an ambitious deputy, as an increasingly impenetrable shorthand known as Ptypede is introduced, a dog-eat-dog world gradually unravels into chaos.See the full content of this document
Extract
Theatre the Memorandum, Perth Theatre 3/5
Director Gerda Stevenson allows her cast to h...
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