So it Goes

Hannah Moss lost her father in 2006. The following year, Ross Sutherland’s grandfather passed away. Both artists are trying to express that experience in their respective shows, but both are struggling to find the words. After all, how do you talk about something as vast and unknowable as death? How do you begin to describe an emotion like grief, raw and irreducible as it is?

Moss turns to silence in So It Goes (4 stars). She was 17 when her dad died, five years after being diagnosed with cancer, and for a long time, she couldn’t talk about it. Here, she follows suit, keeping schtum to remarkable effect. Instead of narrating events, she writes everything down on a small whiteboard that hangs from her neck. Her marker pen squeaks as the words slowly emerge. “I’m not speaking,” she scrawls. “It’s easier.”

That decision elevates So It Goes above other cartoons-on-cardboard-style shows. It retains the playfulness you’d expect from Lecoq grads—X-rays that come out of nowhere, diagnoses pulled from picnic hampers—but Moss’s vow of silence elevates everything.

More than anything, it enforces economy. Those whiteboards can’t hold more than a few words at a time, so there’s no scope for self-indulgence. Moss’s final moments alone with her father are captioned, simply, ‘Bye Dad’ – two words that say everything and nothing at once. They get nowhere close to the enormity of that moment, of course, but in the process they become universal. What else is there to say? What else could anyone say?

Moss is joined onstage by David Ralfe, who pops on running shorts and retro specs to play her dad, and a skirt and pink coat as her mum. The mere fact of his performance is enough – watching one friend helping another to make so personal a show is just gorgeous – and the show feels equally egoless, concerned only with heartfelt honesty.

It’s that which brings on tears in the end – and not just quiet, angel tears, either. By its final scene—a gorgeous, expansive (and, ok, totally sentimental) tribute—I was bawling big, guttural sobs.

Sutherland, on the other hand, spouts words half at random in Standby for Tape Back-up (5 stars). He’s found a VHS tape he and his grandfather used as a sort of video scrapbook. For years, they’d record titbits of television onto it, one clip over another, and the result is a layered miscellany of moving images and nostalgic pop culture: a scene from Ghostbusters, the Fresh Princetheme tune, an old Natwest ad, nineties football, the credits for Jaws.

Our brains are hardwired to find meaning, even where none exists. They seek out connections that aren’t there. Keeping that in mind, Sutherland uses the tape as a writing aide: his poems are spun out of the onscreen images but twist off into big themes of grief, depression, memory, death – all of them vast, insurmountable ideas. Bel Air turns into a metaphor for some sort of afterlife; a Crystal Maze challenge sprouts a philosophy of time. Sutherland rewinds each clip and starts a new poem, finding new meanings, further truths in alternative details.

Individually, these poems are astonishing: jokey in their flippant nods to the video, but hugely profound on top of that. However, it’s the way they add up together that makes Standby for Tape Back-up extra-extraordinary.

This one scrappy video tape—so banal an object, so nearly lost—comes to reflect the human brain in its entirety: the mechanism of memory; its jumble of cultural references that make up an identity; the tape’s deterioration that echoes senile decay. There’s much more besides, all of it built out of coincidence and resonance: the comfort of the known and familiar; the urge to recapture the past and the dead; the knowledge that, one day, Sutherland’s tape will get wiped or chewed by accident and make this entire show unperformable. Standby for Tape Back-up has a shelf-life. It will die a death of its own.

I’ve rarely found myself so rapt by a piece of theatre, nor felt so enlightened en route. Yet Sutherland wears that wisdom so lightly that this never feels wrought or lecturing. Superb.