Suicide Notes … The Spoken Word of Christopher Brett Bailey
Shoreditch Town Hall
Reviewed – 4th May 2018
★★★½
“There is definitely a wonderful show that will come from these previews”
Christopher Brett Bailey’s This is How We Die took the fringe by storm when it emerged. The seemingly simple form, seeing Bailey sat by a desk with a microphone and the script swerved through dark and surreal storytelling and erupted into a climactic wall of music and light. These series of previews of his new material at Shoreditch Town Hall, comprised of different every night showings of brand new short stories, see him return to this set up with fascinating results.
Once again, we find Bailey familiarly sat behind his desk with a stack of papers around him, each waiting to be delicately picked up and shown to their audience. Compared to his previous work, this show and tell was much more relaxed and warm in nature, with audience asides and often breaks of laughter during particularly difficult extracts. On the night we were taken from an enticing and detailed encounter with Adam, the first man and the world, and quickly breezed through to a gloriously apocalyptic goodbye from humans entirely.
Bailey has a natural voice for his writing, engaging and warm yet able to twist and shift at a moment’s notice. He performs tremendous feats of diction and lyrical dexterity, and his writing creates vivid, very changing imagery for us to envisage. He creates hilarious moments from the world he creates, and a set up for a previous girlfriend referring to her downstairs as her ‘axe wound’ created a meeting that it was difficult to stop giggling at for all its sheer weirdness. For a work in progress understandably however there were moments at which punchlines of some stories fell slightly flat and at times lacked some of the razor-sharp appeal that has come to define him.
There is definitely a wonderful show that will come from these previews, and the potential there was obvious to see. At this point it is difficult to review this show due to the open nature of its performance, and acknowledgement that it will develop on from here. It is not quite the final product that it is crying out to become, as it fails to fully feel like a single show, more like a mixed confetti bag of bits. But Bailey’s superb writing ability fires on, and as the lights fall down we are left to consider how we look at suicide, and his gift for finding the beauty and humour in death is something that sticks in the mind and into the night.
Reviewed by Callum McCartney
Photography by Jemima Yong
Suicide Notes … The Spoken Word of Christopher Brett Bailey
“The music cleverly shifts from harmonious and symphonic to distorted and warped”
The Nature of Forgetting devised by Theatre Re focuses on the memories of Tom, aged 55, living with early onset dementia. The play begins on his birthday with his daughter, Sophie helping him get dressed for his party. We then move back and forth through Tom’s memories, from his school days, to his wedding to his childhood sweetheart, Isabella, to the birth of his daughter. There is very little dialogue and instead the piece uses music and movement to tell the story.
All the performers are extremely talented and adept, particularly in physical theatre. Louise Wilcox is fantastic as Isabella, Tom’s wife, and also as Sophie, his daughter. Eygló Belafonte plays Emma, Tom’s childhood friend, and also his mother, Mrs Denis and brings a lot of comedy to both characters. The role of Tom’s school friend and best man, Mike, is played by Matthew Austin and he moves effortlessly between characters and also provides some of the show’s most comic moments. The star of the show is of course, Tom himself played by Guillaume Pigé, who also conceived and directed the show. Pigé throws himself entirely into the role and does a beautiful job of portraying a man’s desperate attempt to cling to his memories as they warp and twist around him. We get the sense that Tom is trying to hold everything in his head and life together, but that it is becoming increasingly difficult.
This sense of distortion of memory is reflected in the music, which is provided by a live band at the back of the stage featuring Alex Judd and Chris Jones. The music cleverly shifts from harmonious and symphonic to distorted and warped to signify when Tom is struggling to remember something, or when a memory, which seemed vivid and solid, starts to transform and fade. The musicians are very accomplished and the music is beautiful, but at times it feels overly sentimental as though the audience are being told how they are supposed to be feeling.
Set and prop makers, Tim Highman and Andreas Velasquez should be commended for their flexible and movable design, which is simple but effective. The set features two large clothing racks, three old-fashioned school desks, some chairs and a fabulous stationary bike which is brought on for one beautiful scene. Katherine Graham’s lighting design is also worth mentioning. The way the lights focus on different parts of the stage seem to mirror the gaps in Tom’s memory.
Overall, The Nature of Forgetting is a heartwarming, physically impressive show. Its lack of dialogue not only makes it engaging but also extremely accessible, especially for those who are hard of hearing, who don’t speak English, or for younger audiences.
