Theatre
by Stuart Bowden        
Sun 25 Jan
Blue Room Theatre
by Kate Prendergast

A bearded man in a segmented, lime-green sleeping bag flops onto the stage. She (the creature is a female) is the last of her kind. Undiscovered, undefined, and very much alone, she grapples with alienation and the fugitive wanderings of a solitary mind, which make her hallucinate and think rather too much on terrible hypotheticals. Like, for instance, the of laying an egg so expulsively fast it would smash upon impact with the ground.

As the creature’s father—who makes brief appearance within the narration as a glow-slimey ghost— describes his daughter, Stuart Bowden’s one-man performance, Before Us, is “fragile and strange”; sombre and joyous. Aided by the comic plangency of his tiny hand-held keyboard, a tender absurdity is drawn out for which the artist behind such award-winning works as She Was Probably Not A Robot, The Beast and Doctor Brown and His Singing Tiger has become known and cherished.

Accompanying our gaffe-prone caterpillar through her neuroses, tribulations and memories, we find that what initially seems an arbitrary flinging together of bizarre scenarios ultimately coalesces and resolves itself into something quite dazzling. Bold in its vulnerability, ingenious in its creative tilts, and masterful in its storytelling, the show makes the heart creep with loving shyness right out of the chest.

It is also very funny. Very. Bowden’s style of physical humour and wordplay can truly be said to be in a breed of its own. Inventing, interbreeding and looping back on its own sort of canny silly, the show weaves a series of in-jokes that the audience falls back and unites on, snickeringly.

Involving the audience in his story— emotionally and actively— is perhaps what makes Bowden’s show so rewarding. Without giving too much away, the fourth wall is broken in more ways than one, so that you find yourself doing things and feelings thing you might not have expected to do or to feel. The glow of cute intimacy that results has a co-conspirator in the cove-like arena of the Blue Room and its warm, crepuscular lighting.

At the very beginning of the show, our creature tells us with camp pomp: “my story, my words, and my body will fulfil you”. Sublimely, they do.

Before Us will be showing at The Blue Room theatre until January 31. Tickets are available here.