Epic
Soho Theatre
History is epic, convoluted and conflicting territory - pardon the tautology- so for a group of four performers to attempt to tackle it onstage, throwing family history in the mix, is quite the endeavour. Foster&Dechery’s performance is entirely aware of this, and makes the most of it too, in an intriguing and unusual show with transparent mechanics and tonnes of wit. Epic is charming, playful and a journey worth taking.
The show creeps up on you in its quiet confidence, ridiculously absorbing sense of humour and dead-pan neo-Brechtian approach to accessing history. It crosses a minefield of personal and collective histories to explore what our relationship to legacy is, and how different generations interact with history.
Improbable Associate Director Lucy Foster, French performer Chloe Dechery, the wonderful live artist Ed Rapley and the Portugese performer Pedro Ines perform weird and wonderful re-enactments of the 20th century alongside, and in dialogue with, filmed interviews with various members of their families. These Brechtian vignettes- honoured with a cameo from the man himself- are also paved with choreographic moments and musical interludes. The 1968 French riots, the death of Archduke Ferdinand, the bombing of a World War Two ship, a speech by Salazar (who according to Pedro, is the reason why we “don’t know shit about Portugal”)- key moments intertwined with personal politics. The narratives become intertwined, the stage becomes an ironic but genuine living document of this cacophony that is history and somewhere along the way, clarity emerges.
Filmed interviews are projected onto a series of moving screens that dance around the stage in various combinations, as the performers pause next to their relatives, filling in the gaps, providing context, describing how they feel about these imperfect recollection and sometimes re-enacting events they connect with. The performance is filled with the life of its participants, be it in Pedro’s guitar playing, Chloe’s discussions with her grandfather, Lucy’s lack of conviction in the significance of her own history and Ed’s network of connections with some of the crème de la crème of history (he can trace a connection with almost anyone).
Big questions posed light-heartedly, open to imperfection, sometimes conflicting, sometimes poetic and always fun without falling for romantics. That’s important- a show about history without the nostalgia. Here is where Brecht comes in- the deadpan humour and the discipline of each scene give Epic its dynamism, and the performers’ candid presence and clear positions in these ingredients mean the show never becomes dissonant, despite the seemingly convoluted content.
Epic is never too serious with itself or its content, lingering between models of expression onstage, dancing its way from scientific re-enactments to bursts of anarchy. Its honesty is highly manipulative- the intimacy created onstage allows us to project some of our thoughts into the mix.
Communities form differently, our relationship to history, ways of documenting it, family legacies have changed; what Epic manages to achieve so successfully is to trace a through-line between these seemingly disparate events we read about in history books, and life experiences- what we feel we can leave behind and what we can carry with us; what will remain significant and important to us. Indeed, in Ed’s wise words, “history has no kingdom”.
Tagged: Chloe Dechery, Ed Rapley, Lucy Foster, Soho Theatre