Bereavement is not something I have a lot of experience of. None of my close relatives have died yet, healthy genes or something I suppose. Of course, that day will come, and although you can prepare for the inevitable none of us, actually, know how we will react or how long it will take us to get used to that loved one not being around.
It is this scenario that the Certain Dark Things production of Melancholy at Slung Low explores.
One of the responsibilities of my career as a HR professional has been to be there to support employees who experience a bereavement. This support can take many forms, but Melancholy has brought to mind the first time that it fell to me to write to an employee who had just been widowed. What can you put in a letter of condolence to someone you hardly know, when you are writing on behalf of the CEO of an organisation. My older more experienced colleague told me with confidence, “It doesn’t actually matter what you write, the important thing is that the letter arrives”. I suppose that is true, there are no words, nothing that you can say, which are really going to make the experience of bereavement, any less devastating. So, perhaps the lack of words in Melancholy is one of the reasons why it is so effective.
Melancholy is a mixture of video, music, mime and puppetry. The performance opens with a musical video which provides the back story to the events that will unfold on stage, as our hero goes through the stages of bereavement.
Every aspect of this performance gels perfectly, the animated video provides the back story and link sequences, the music amplifies the emotions of loss, anger, hope and eventual acceptance, and the puppetry provides the logic that good friends often supply in times of hardship. The puppet is almost deliberately an abstract of a human form. At times, it is childlike at others it displays a wisdom beyond the comprehension of a child.
Some people, I am told after the show, see the puppet as the hero’s soul, others see his child, or the spirit of his lost love. All are possible, but for me I am reminded that when we lose a parent we must say good-bye to our past, when we lose a child, we lose our future, but when we lose a partner we lose part of ourselves. I suppose that is what the puppet represents for me, the piece of ourselves that we lose when someone close to us dies, regardless of the circumstances.
The part of himself that our hero, a scientist, has lost only appears on stage as a silhouette portrait, but somehow the power of her presence is almost tangible such is the emotion in Stephen McCabe’s performance. In less than an hour he displays a cornucopia of the emotions of bereavement and reminds me as Queen Elizabeth said in a letter to New York after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, grief is the price we pay for love.
There are some elements of the plot that could, were it not for the way in which they are played fall in to farce, but instead the interaction between the scientist and the puppet shows the sensitivity of a friend supporting a friend even when the objective has no hope of being achieved, sometimes the important thing is to be there.
From the puppeteers, the actor and the design there is obvious talent on display in this production, but as Porl from Slung Low explains to me, talent is just part of the equation, training is what turns talent into the skills that enable the production of performances of this quality. I am glad that I have seen it and suggest that you do too if you get the opportunity.
During the day Michael Millward is a HR professional.