Review of The Hats of Mr. Zenobe

The Hats of Mr. Zenobe

The Hats of Mr. Zenobe is not so much about tragedy, as it is about the power of the human creative mind....something that empowers in a world that was, for Poladian, and even for us now, seems to drag us along with it despite our best efforts.


Vue Weekly

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The Hats of Mr. Zenobe

In this century of dispossession the ultimate refugee is the man who carries his own door with him. The pudgy patchwork figure who shambles onstage at the start of Robert Astle's new one-man show is trailing, and pushing, an overflowing collection of junk: shabby suitcases, a tatty doll's buggy, velvet curtains, a headless dressmaker's dummy, a hat stand...and a wooden door.

What gives The Hats of Mr. Zenobe its peculiar texture and flavour is this weave of fascinating story with insights into its teller. It was inspired by the true-life biography of exiled Armenian Vahan Poladian, who transformed a veritable catalogue of personal tragedies and losses into a kind of street satire cum pageant, from the home base of an anylum for elderly Armenians in France. Poladian saved himself from despair and madness by his own deliberate acts of creation. On a stipend of a franc a day he assembled an amazing collection of hats, costumes, canes, umbrellas, spectacles, stuff, and emerged twice daily for 30 years into the street to make people laugh by his performances.

In an amazing succession of hats—which substitute for his squashed fedora, a bizarre military helmet, a dictaphone through which man may speak to God, a miner's helmet with lamp, and many others—Mr. Zenobe's own heart-wrenching story of exile, conscription, internment, and dispossession unfolds.

What we see is the transmutation of politics into agit-prop headgear and tragedy into entertainment. It's a surprising, inventive, hat-felt piece of work from one of our original artists.


The Edmonton Journal

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