We’ve all done it….pressed send and that insulting email wings it way through cyberspace to the very person who should never see it. Oh Fuck.
That is just one Oh Fuck Moment that Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe set out to explore in this intimate show as part of the Transform festival.
Their simple premise is that we have all had an Oh Fuck Moment, but in a small room with 20 strangers they invite us to fess up and see that fucking up can perversely be a positive experience.
Hannah Jane kicks proceedings off with a convoluted tale involving a horse obsessed co-worker, a horse’s head in said women’s bed and her misdirected email. Oh fuck.
Maybe it’s the pilot who made one simple mistake and killed more than 100 people. Oh fuck to the max.
But it could be the moment you miss your dad dying because you had a nap. Oh Fuck.
What makes this show engaging is we are all asked to write down our ‘Oh Fuck moments’, and let’s face it we have all had them.
It’s an oddly intimate experience when three strangers selected at random bear their souls. Somehow more intimate than watching a load of luvvies emoting on stage.
So one punter threw his Les Paul into the audience at a gig smashing it to bits. Oh fuck.
Another realised that his daughter’s passport has expired on the day of a family holiday. Oh Fuck.
Or the woman who got her dog’s paw trapped in a tube escalator maiming it. Oh Fuck.
We were asked to vote which was the moment that wasn’t fixable, and the injured dog won by a mile.
The central thought of this clever and down to earth show is that we are conditioned from birth to be scared of failure, and to run away from it. Hannah Jane and Chris want us to celebrate our fucking up, and simply learn from it rather than wallowing in self pity or recrimination.
It’s a bit naive to suggest we can simply throw off years of social conditioning by writing our fucks ups on a post it note, but The Oh Fuck Moment certainly makes a strong case that such moments can rise above embarrassment becoming somehow cathartic.