Do you still suck your thumb? Is Peter ‘The Cat’ Bonetti still in goal? Are you in a west end musical yet?
These, I like to think, are the questions my younger self would ask my older self. Hindsight can be so useful. The Gob Squad company of young actors went through this process in real time and the outcome is one of the many tremendous scenes that coalesce… Before Your Very Eyes.
The piece was reviewed by Mim King for Total Theatre in June 2012, when it was shown at The Unicorn as part of LIFT and it remains as fresh, original and emotionally charged as it was then.
The tight direction, the assuredness of the cast and clever way in which the work manipulates the actors and the audience, remain. What has changed, of course, is the age of the actors. The gap between their younger selves, captured on film, and as they are now – young adults really – gives an even deeper sense of time passing and impending mortality.
By the time you read this, Gob Squad may have given the final ever performances of this show, in Ghent, hosted by the commissioning partner Campo. For a piece about the passing of time, how apt that it is itself time-limited. As they filed out of their mirrored stage box, backwards, and into the film of their younger selves, played backwards, a real shiver went down my back. That it must remain only in our memories is beautiful.