PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol (Tue 18-Fri 21 Oct)

THEATRE ‘My Previous Self’ tells the story of Nick, who suffers from retrograde amnesia, and his desperate attempts to regain a sense of the person he was before the accident that caused him to lose his memory. Aiding him in this struggle are the mysterious Chloe, and the terrifying potential of the internet.

Set on the cosy stage of the fledgling Wardrobe Theatre, a small venue in the tradition of the Alma Tavern, Dom Rowe's play follows Nick’s effort to rebuild an image of his previous self based on fragments that he can’t quite piece together to make a whole: ranging from the grotesquely moving (a colonoscopy video that he dubs the closest thing he owns to a family album) to the trivial (snippets of his music taste), the details he possesses about his past are scant and the light they shed on his personality and past experience is negligible.

Nick creates a Facebook profile in the hope of being contacted by his absent friends, and sets up a YouTube channel to chronicle his daily negotiations with the world as he grapples to come to terms with a memory-less existence. Here, however, the play takes a turn: it soon becomes evident that amnesia is not the subject of the play, but rather a pretext for an eerie story involving gruesome murders, cryptic letters, and an ever-approaching threat, the full significance of which is not revealed until the play's final moments.

Jack Johns and Charlotte Ellis both give watertight performances as their respective characters. Johns spends the vast majority of the piece on his own on stage, and his success in pulling this off without dropping the audience’s attention for a moment is certainly a testament to his talent. Ellis creates a tense, imperceptibly teeth-grinding Chloe, and her somewhat awkward interaction with Johns’s character can be explained by the play’s denouement. Jemima Robinson’s light design adds an interesting dimension to Nick’s search for his previous self, providing as it does a parallel between the character’s switching on/switching off the internet and his recoiling from situations he finds himself unable to deal with.

The company request written feedback on the production at the end of the performance, and indeed there's a strong sense that the play is still in the process of being figured out. This reviewer felt that more weight could have been put on the paradoxical impossibility of recreating one’s self through one’s online persona, despite the overabundance of information people splurge about themselves all over social networking sites and the like. ‘My Previous Self’, as it stands, has the potential of moving towards two rather distinct directions, and Edible Theatre must  make a firm decision as to where they want to go with the play. Nevertheless, it is evident from the production as a whole that the company has tapped into an urgent and contemporary subject that could become the core of a truly ground-breaking play. (Regina Papachlimitzou)

Copyright Regina Papachlimitzou 2011