Postcards Festival: 7 Day Drunk/10 Ways to Die on Stage

Postcards Festival

7 Day Drunk/10 Ways to Die on Stage

Jacksons Lane

What’s so striking about Bryony Kimming’s 7 Day Drunk and Ed Rapley’s 10Ways to Die on Stage is how they each investigate the relationship between the personal and the fictional in fun, intimate, risk-taking and engaging work.

Kimmings’ new show is an intoxicated blend of fruits, song, dance, confession and drug trip, the result of an experiment in which she was kept in a variety of states of drunkenness and observed by various scientific minds, from a neuroscientist to a sociologist. The tone of the show is typically witty, abrasive and evocative- Kimmings is constantly surprising and inquisitive with her own material. She’ll carry you in one direction, build a relationship, then confidently break it to change perspective.

7 day Drunk is hilarious, calculated drunken play with dancing and singing and big cuddly toys and lemon and salt ritual, The casual and detached tone Kimmings maintains is in antithesis with what she does onstage, which means there’s a potent emotional arch to the story but things never get nostalgic. Kimmings’ work contains both intimate moments and quirky spectacle; she begins wearing a costume she designed whilst drunk; she finishes on the floor in a clown suit that doubles up as pajama.

The show puts together historical recounts true and false (references to Charlie Sheen and Oscar Wilde included) and a lot of stage debauchery - it’s evocative of a surreal drunken party but with some complex mechanics and a whirlwind of ideas. Kimmings has distilled her research into a clever, witty, fun and mad show that in the end throws out surprisingly sober questions.

Yet if Kimmings is a powerhouse of gear shifts, Rapley is somewhat of a skilled manipulator. Using a small paddling pool, a ladder, a balloon and a jug, he’s constantly toying with meaning and our relationship to the stage. Referencing an older and more unsuccessful version of the show, playing with expectations and including some personal stories along the way, Rapley creates an engaging, beautiful and nostalgic show about our relationship to risk, but also about performing.

10 Ways to Die on Stage is, unsurprisingly for Rapley, not about dying onstage. In a show that uses physical comedy and subverts the usual formal structures of stand-up, he throws his own life to dissect, yet plays on our expectations of what is real and false from the onset; this is, in a way, both about our relationship to childhood, but also about what happens when a performer really meets his audience. This creates a tension that he toys with throughout the show, which Rapley pushes a little bit further with every scene.

Rapley’s solo is both comic and dramatic, never revealing too much and keeping its audience on the brink. Rapley gives meaning to the objects on stage by painting a portrait of his own relationship to childhood, and the journey we embark on with him is evocative and intimate.

Rapley has a meaningful relationship to punishment during the show, which becomes transformative for both him and the audience, as we watch him drink a jug of salt water and hide in the metaphors he’s created onstage. Rapley’s skill lies in constantly shifting his relationship with the audience; 10 Ways to Die on Stage brings clowning into the mix, and the balance between physical comedy and live art is an intriguing and powerful aspect of the show.