THIS IS HOW WE DIE | STAGE REVIEW
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Tues 23 June
I was so blown away by Christopher Brett Bailey’s astonishing monologue This Is How We Die at Chapter Arts that the first thing I did when I got home was download an e-book of the script from a well-known tax avoiding online retailer. This impulse buy seemed rather apt given Bailey’s play pierces through the nerve centre of our commoditised culture. Bailey channels the ghosts of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs in a virtuoso display of wordsmanship, with hints of the deadbeat poetry of Charles Bukowski and the millennial sardonicism of Douglas Coupland and David Foster Wallace. Starting at a breakneck speed of delivery, Bailey takes the audience on a surrealist, ferocious word trip that explores the contradictions, absurdity and casual violence of our modern world obsessed with the social ephemera of Twitter feeds and Facebook updates.
The staging is simple yet powerfully effective: lit by an overhead spotlight that steadily increases its area of illumination, Bailey sits at a plain wooden desk – a glass of water and microphone his only props – reading from sheaves of paper. Confessional style monologues have been a staple of North American theatre for over thirty years now, from the feminist performance artist Holly Hughes through to the late, great, much missed Spalding Gray. It’s not over exaggerating to place Bailey’s name alongside such exalted company for his piece is an instant classic, a punch right to the stomach of a comatose, complacent, always-on culture.
Taking in the ‘frothing idiocy’ of racism (‘Death to the Ism!’), the bizarre rituals of modern capitalism and the fictions that sustain our fantasies, Bailey’s torrent of words crashes over and into the audience, waves of language that merely sets us up for a musical denouement of such sonic intensity that it assaults the senses in every way imaginable. Yet for all the frantic verbiage Bailey’s performance is beautifully controlled and measured, taking in pauses and moments of silence that are all the more illuminated for their scarcity.
Humour abounds amongst the ruins; sometimes the description of violence is so surreal that it takes on the quality of a fevered dream, like a decapitation in the American desert or a runaway car ruining a ‘meet the dysfunctional Parents’ scenario. I particularly loved the line ‘Roger Moore admits doing it for the money’, and the romantic date with himself was a big crowd pleaser. The overriding themes of the culture of death and the death of culture, however, permeates the play – from the fantasy of murdering fascists on the London underground to the practical problem of where to store our bodies when we die.
Towards the conclusion of the monologue Bailey intones ‘our savage tongues’ will ‘lick the wounds of our loved ones’ and as the lights fade into black the performance ends on a strangely elegiac note amidst a cacophony of feedback and white noise. Perhaps, in the end, what we get is language in its purest form.
words ALEX WREN image JULIAN MARTINEZ MILLA