We don’t usually sit around recalling our mistakes. You can’t just unsend an email sent to the wrong person, and we often spend our lives trying to forget these things ever happened. This performance by Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe was designed to tempt skeletons from the cupboard and offer redemption.
We sat round a boardroom table and were asked to write down that moment, the one there was no way back from, when we wished the earth would suddenly swallow us up whole. Whoever drew the short straw was asked to share theirs – for the rest of us to judge. There was no compulsion to do so and other opportunities for participation were not always exploited.
What emerged was, as onlookers, we see a way back for others; nothing much is indelible. Yet we are harsh with ourselves, conditioned to believe we shouldn’t make mistakes and are finished when we do.
Delivering their script matter of factly, with the absence of emotion of newsreaders, the pair told of mistakes we could smile at knowingly, or groan at, or which provoked horror: thank goodness that one wasn’t mine. Why, though? This was the question they asked, provoking thought long after the session was over.
For why would someone die in a pool of blood rather than allow emergency services see what they had been up to? Details here would spoil the show, but the one about the man and the hockey stick was not for the fainthearted.
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