I Tried To Fuck Up The System But None Of My Friends Texted Me Back // Travis Alabanza

In the the Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room at the end of an intense festival weekend, the audience experienced this work through headphones, pre-made recordings, mime, audience interaction, dance and the combing of hair. Intimacy was referenced and we were given an insight into the artists’ thoughts through headphones that place Alabanza ‘inside’ your head. We were on the London Underground. A woman was crying. A man tried to comfort her. It felt better. 

Alabanza narrates dimensions of loneliness. It’s in the soles of your feet, it’s compassion verses danger, it’s failure and perfection and it’s about fear of people you don’t know. Their voice is strangely comforting as they talk to us about texting and everyone being on a podium. They talk to us about how they cried on the Underground after a friend died and no one helped. London is ranked as one of the loneliest cities in the world, and loneliness is about a lack of connection or communication with other people or animals. It can be felt even when you’re surrounded by other people.

Gradually, throughout the piece the audience were able to decide to join in: to dance, to be a human sculpture, to comfort people. The show ended with someone from the audience combing Alabanza’s hair, just as their Mum used to. This was loneliness and togetherness as an epic, multi layered and multi-sensory experience. The piece discussed chronic loneliness, but somehow by the end I felt, as many of the audience seemed to, as though we’d shared something together. This, as Alabanza explains, is a way to fuck up the system and to make a change. 

- Gini Simpson

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Travis Alabanza

Is Travis Alabanza the future of theatre? - Guardian

Loneliness Lab

Samaritans (UK)

Humans of Greater London

Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus // Oona Doherty

The audience hubbub subsides as a clapped-out old car with a bin bag taped over the front passenger side window revs up to just in front of Vooruit, its shell suited occupants diving out to fall to the floor. From the car blasts out music, lyrics suggesting the Northern Irish origin and Belfast base of the artist. People crane their heads in the drizzle to see over the shoulders of people in front of them, and the two who tumbled from the car continue to dance.

This street scene makes sense as the place where the piece begins. It reminds me of the earlier days of teenage licenses, aimless driving around and the blaring of music on suburban streets. Of brief furtive incursions into the city, from where you live to where it all happens. And then the car drives off, leaving the artist alone in the road with the reedy bass from the car fading off into the distance. This forlorn figure, angry in their loneliness, turns back to the crowd.  

‘Go inside the theatre! Go inside the theatre!’ they bellow.

Obligingly trudging up endless stairs and taking up seats, the solo movement which follows trips and wallows in the universal visual language of bored and disaffected men. Gender is the subject throughout, a physical and vocal cycling through anger, cockiness and vulnerability in language after language - from German to English to guttural cough. The transition from space to space is as smooth as the invisible seams between dialect shifts, suggesting perhaps a universal European anxiety, an illustration of a free movement of deprivation, forgetfulness and the rejection of empathy that prowls round the backs of our superficial wealth. 

The solo ends in rapturous choral form, before the back doors swing open to reveal the picture of the missing driver, long lost from the car and alone at a cheap folding table. Watching tinny football on a glowing laptop whilst drinking beer. It’s an image that could be snapped in any country in the world of an isolated man and the undocumented experience of small room unhappiness. The audience are invited to share a beer in the space of the stage, a social bond to be formed in the dim half-light from the sad picture behind. The move-down begins and ends in the slow shuffle of feet, with drinks clasped to our breasts like guards against feeling. The football plays on. 

-      Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Oona Doherty - Hope Hunt and the Ascension in Lazarus

Oona Doherty takes on Belfast’s Hardest Men - Irish Times

La danse virulente et poétique d’Oona Doherty - Le Monde (en Français)

The Crisis in Modern Masculinity - Guardian

A Tale of Two Masculinities - The New European

A DREAM OF DYING // Fake Escape Theatre

Life is just a matter of appropriate planning. A good life is a well ordered life. The fullest life is the most neatly divided life. Birth, school (“with outstanding grades”), a lucrative job, a beautiful wife, a spacious suburban house, grinning suburban children, early retirement, grinning suburban grandchildren, a cheerful death and a well peopled funeral. It’s so simple, so simply broken down.

All that’s known of the ‘real’ Peter Bergmann is that he spent the last few days of his life in 2009 in the Irish city, Sligo. Every possible step had been taken to eradicate any clues relating to his identity. No tags on his clothes. No identification. No personal effects. No traces of a life. Even the name was an alias. It endures to this day, a mystery unresolved and apparently unresolvable.

Treasa Nealon’s script seeks to provide something approaching context to this strange, poignant tale. Lawrence Boothman’s performance as Bergman is pitched at a hypersensitive frequency, at turns vaudevillian, needy, broadly comic, shatteringly fragile and wildly allusive (there are strains of Yeats and Beckett throughout). 

As an audience we are treated to a spectacle at once manic and potentially hallucinatory. Boothman’s performance and multi-angled characterisation leaves it unclear whether the memories of family life and friendship are real or the projected fragments of an unhealthy mind. It plays with our ideas about self-determination and agency. The illusion of life being a simply ordered thing is supplanted by the realisation that the only real control we have is over our deaths. It’s not just a dramatic concern, but one that we deal with directly (and indirectly) in our society. It’s the question of the ‘right’ to die, and the question what significance an unexamined, ‘unmourned’ death has in comparison to conventional notions of dying as an event.

- FG

A Dream of Dying played at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dream-of-dying

Loneliness Swallowed Me Up- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/28/emily-white-loneliness

Life-hating Loneliness- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201303/life-halting-loneliness

Sense and Nonsense: an essay dealing with the ethics of schizophrenia research- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996498001285

 A short essay on the mystery of mental illness- http://noelbell.net/resources/world-mental-health-day-resources/the-mystery-of-mental-illness/

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/

STORIES TO TELL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT // Francesca Millican-Slater

Francesca Millican-Slater's work tends to be autobiographical: Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs traced her journey across the UK in search of the recipient of an enigmatic postcard, while Forensics of a Flat unfolded the history of her peculiar home in Birmingham, a former office above a shop. The same is sort-of true of this show, but only in its starting point: as documented on the accompanying blog, she experiences chronic insomnia, and the stories she tells over the course of the hour are a reflection of the fantastical thoughts that plague her through the night.

Insomnia is a common problem – the NHS estimates that one in three people in the UK experience it regularly – and on the surface Millican-Slater's stories evoke the banal: one features a couple in a supermarket; another, a couple disturbed by the insistent loud music played by their neighbours after hours. A man in one story attempts to find friendship among his colleagues in a pork-pie factory; a man in another strikes up conversation with a cafe owner and a newspaper vendor on his early morning walks. However, each vignette quickly takes a Tales of the Unexpected detour towards the weird. The factory worker is demoted when he constructs a pastry penis; the street blares with noise as neighbours compete to play their own favoured style of music at the highest volume. The tone is more often kind than sinister, particularly in the tale of a mysterious matchmaker, a man who stalks people he knows to be single, then attempts to pair them up, functioning as an “analogue Tinder”.

Sleeplessness is a lonely and often furious place, and many of the characters in these stories are lonely and furious, too – particularly those already in couples. The overlap between insomnia and depression is suggested in an undercurrent hum of desire for meaning, or purpose, or connection, most audible in the story about the man who begins each day walking his neighbourhood, convinced that the world would fall apart if he didn't. The blue light that bathes Millican-Slater's face speaks of the computer screens that promise connection but only in isolation. Listening to her, the audience sit in isolation, too: joined together by her velveteen voice, spinning a web of strangeness.

(MC)

Stories To Tell in the Middle of the Night is on at 10.15 at Summerhall until August 28. See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/stories-to-tell-in-the-middle-of-the-night

Basic insomnia facts: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Insomnia/Pages/Introduction.aspx

On the relationship between insomnia, anxiety and depression: https://sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/content/what-causes-insomnia

On the cultural rise of lack of sleep: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/10304984/Is-there-any-way-to-cure-insomnia.html

On mindfulness as a cure for insomnia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/09/sleep-how-to-beat-insomnia

The blog accompanying the show: http://www.storiestotellinthemiddleofthenight.com/