GRIEFCASE
Hope Theatre
★★★
“an hour of excess and reckoning whose ultimate message is simple: endure”
Griefcase is 60 minutes of jagged spectacle, there and gone in a flash and similarly leaving a lingering trace of itself.
In keeping with the title, there are literally cases hanging from the ceiling, half open with clothes spilling out. Luggage overhead, and emotional baggage scattered all around in this first co-production from the Hope, created by Tailwind Physical Theatre and directed by Jack Mckee.
The production is a woozy kaleidoscope comprising shards of dialogue and movement that sometimes coalesces into dance.
At its heart is G, a gay man of 30, doing well for himself in his corporate job and blithely ignoring a council house mother who no longer suits his lifestyle, what with her drinking and her hollering.
Then she dies. G is stuck in a liminal space, pulled this way and that (often by his friends, frequently by his tie) as he comes to terms with past and present, guilt and love, mother and son.
G (Ru Lawrence, also the writer) is one of four on the Hope’s traverse stage, thumping around like your upstairs neighbour. Elsewhere we have Poppy Janisch (particularly good), Collette Hodson and Jack St Leger as Lucy or Mum or work pal Garry but often as a yomping chorus, the exhibition of G’s inner turmoil. They’re forever tugging at him, pestering him, consoling him.
‘I lost my dog last year so I know what you’re going through,’ says Garry, awkwardly, against a backdrop of trite elevator music.
The cast slip between drama and dance with seamless ease to create a collage of the banal and the surreal. Sometimes they drift into a state of grace, other times into a frenzy of violence, a ballet of necessary and urgent connections played out to a discordant spoon-on-pan soundscape.
The production feels like a drunken night with workmates to celebrate a Q4 sales success – which it occasionally is. All karaoke, regret, booze and nostalgia. Unpacking the meaning of life over shots with strangers in a state of tear-racked catharsis.
There isn’t much story here – we learn nothing profound about the stock characters – but that, in a way, is the nature of grief: clichéd and commonplace as a spectator sport, uniquely tortuous as personal trauma. The production captures both extremes, mawkish in places, yet occasionally falling upon an alchemy of exultation.
Griefcase is an hour of excess and reckoning whose ultimate message is simple: endure.
GRIEFCASE
Hope Theatre
Reviewed on 23rd September 2026
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Hamish MacGillivray
