Day 20 - Story of a Rabbit - forgettable

I remember this show not creating a buzz at last year's Edinburgh festival, so I'm not sure why it's popped up here. A day later and I'm trying to remember what I witnessed last night - the play, you see was about memory. What a great theme. However, tales about memories, like the retelling of dreams, are so personal that they bore others. Ultimately the performance fails because it doesn't do what it promises - to elicit personal memories in the audience and that was the only way this was going to work.

Multimedia and memory
The use of 'multimedia' props was clever, as it mirrored the fragmented and different forms of memory - episodic, semantic, autobiographical, lucid and so on. There was text, a flip chart, old family film, photographs, physical props, music; but these were his memories and flat and unremarkable to me. It started rather well, with a dialogue with a audience member about tea and its association with funerals. Then it drifted into a grinning monologue about the death of the performer's father. I found this wearisome and found it difficult to stick with it, drifting, as we so often do during theatrical performances.

Death's in the detail
His metaphysical reflections about particles and potatoes were just banal. My mind was not opened by the experience and popping up a couple of quotes by Wittgenstein and Einstein is, frankly, as cliched a act as I ca imagine in the theatre.

PowerPoint again
PowerPoint made its third appearance in this festival (Creative Brighton, Jarvis Cocker). Funny how the arts takes so long to catch up with technological change, then jumps on bandwagon's long after the wagons have gone (Rider Spoke).

Brave attempt but it didn't work.