Rebecca Peyton in Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, currently running at the Finborough Theatre. Photo: Michele Engeler
Since Saturday last, I’ve witnessed an unusually high amount of grief for an average week in January.
First I saw the Greek film Attenberg on DVD (out on Monday 16 Jan), directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari (see my review here). It is an intensely quirky and non-conformist look at, among other things, grief and death. We follow Marina – played by Ariane Labed – whose father is dying.
Marina has a best friend Bella, played by Evangelia Randou, with whom she shares a baffling sense of humour and a love of silly walking a la Monty Python, but this is a different relationship to the one she has with her father whose illness is slowly killing him.
Marina and her father are close. They enjoy pretending to be gorillas together and talk frankly to one another. They are, it seems by the end of the film, soulmates.
Marina’s grief is slow burning. There’s no crying and no melodrama. She objects a couple of times to her father discussing funeral arrangements, but that and falling face down onto a bed in a resigned ‘giving up’ moment is as far as she gets in terms of an expression of grief. It’s a cerebral, contained representation. Marina is resigned to what has and will happen.
The second injection of grief I experienced was in a play. Catharsis was central to the Greek’s attitude to theatre. To witness another’s rage, happiness, tears, to live vicariously through a character’s intense emotional reaction, was a way of making sure that none of that dangerous feeling was let loose on the world. Rebecca Peyton’s play Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, takes you on a vivid, tangible journey through her own experience of grief.
Running every Monday and Sunday at the Finborough theatre until January 23, the play is written and performed by Peyton. She stands on a blank stage and tells us frankly about what happened to her sister. Kate Peyton was killed in 2005 in Somalia when she was working as a journalist. She had been sent there by the BBC and was subsequently shot in the back.
Rebecca’s entire piece stems from her grief; her need to tell people what happened and to express the shock, pain and frustration felt at the prospect of never seeing her older sister again. Onstage, Peyton relives the moment when she is told over the phone that her sister has been shot. Shot but not dead, those moments hold a kind of forced hope for Peyton. She clings to the idea that her sister will recover. Then later, while Rebecca is talking to her mother over the phone in the back of a friend’s car in Charing Cross her mother lets out a visceral, guttural noise as she realises her daughter has died of her wounds. Rebecca re-enacts that noise, which sends shivers down the spine and brings tears to the eyes. We can almost imagine that feeling. We are almost reliving it with her.
Hamlet is another play filled to bursting with grief and what it can make people do. I saw the generally applauded version (Charles Spencer gave it two stars while most other reviewers gave it four) from Ian Rickson, starring Welsh actor Michael Sheen, at the Young Vic which is nearing the end of its run. I’ve always loved Hamlet, but watching this version I noticed how much grief is central to the words and motivations of the characters.
In the first scene where we see the prince, his mother Gertrude and step-father Claudius together (here in a 70s-era mental hospital with the cast sat round on chairs as if they were in some kind of counselling meeting), grief is mentioned many times: ‘…’Tis unmanly grief’ says Claudius ‘It shows a will most incorrect to heaven.’ He chides Hamlet, and calls him selfish in languishing over the death of his father.
Hamlet’s speech which begins ‘Seems Madam? nay it is, I know not seems’ stands out in this production. The betrayed prince tells his mother and Claudius that his woe comes from within, he is helpless to control it and that it does not conform to people’s expectations – the ‘fruitful river in the eye’ the ‘customary suits of solemn black’ the ‘dejected haviour of the visage’.
Hamlet suggests that, when felt genuinely, grief is uncontrollable. It comes with no form and cannot be measured. Just as with Rebecca Peyton’s reaction to her sister’s death, grief manifests itself in unexpected ways. It makes one cry out involuntarily, it can propel someone to make something, to write something and to take revenge. It can also make a person see life differently, as it does with Marina in Attenberg.
I was lucky enough to see a screening of The Descendants this week too. It’s out January 27, and I would recommend trying to get to see it. It is George Clooney’s most recent and is by Alexander Payne, the director of Sideways – the unexpected hit about wine and depression starring Paul Giamatti from 2004.
This too featured grief in its rawest form. A mother is thrown from a speedboat and is left in a coma. She leaves her two young daughters and her husband (Clooney) pondering on the importance of life of death, of the people we love and of missed chances. I can’t say too much about it, but it is worth a watch.
Tags: Attenberg, DVD, film, George Clooney, grief, hamlet, michael sheen, play, Shakespeare, Sometimes I laugh like my sister, The Descendants, The young vic, theatre
