Fake It 'Til You Make It

Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn: Fake It ‘Til You Make IT

In which performance artist Bryony Kimmings is joined by her advertising accounts manager boyfriend Tim Grayburn in the creation of a show exploring his clinical depression, her response to this, and their decision to face it together as they move forward as a couple, now expecting their first child.

On one level, there’s not much drama to the piece. Everything is presented upfront. We know the outcome from the beginning. They’re together. Tim has left his job and joined Bryony as a theatre-maker and touring performer. She’s pregnant. He’s handling his depression. Yet it’s filled with drama, as we backtrack to the start of the couple’s relationship, their falling in love, Bryony’s discovery of Tim’s terrible dark secret, her desire to rescue him, his attempt to kick the SSRIs (anti-depression drugs), his recovery, his regression, his further recovery, and where they are at now. It has us on the edge of their seats, our hearts in our mouths. For many audience members, there is no attempt to hold back the tears as we hear Tim’s pre-recorded voice (a series of audio interviews the couple have made, used throughout the piece) describing the onset of his depression, the symptoms – fatigue, anxiety, poor concentration, agitation etc – and the confusion and suicidal thoughts that followed. He is – and this is truly depressing in the 21st century – a young man who feels that he can’t share his worries with his friends or family, can’t visit a doctor. Real men don’t cry, so he hides the tears that pour from him daily.

This is issue-based theatre with a strong message: the outcome is the statement that a real man is not afraid to cry. A real man asks for help. The couple’s son will be told about his father’s depression – nothing will be hidden.

But it is a Bryony Kimmings show, so this is all played out in typical Kimmings fashion – what Andy Field calls ‘Bryony-ness’ in the notes he has written for the playscript. For yes, Bryony is at the Traverse, and there is a playscript. Performance art has come a long way – once upon a time you had to search very hard to find performance texts by the likes of Karen Finlay and Lenora Champagne, Bryony’s natural predecessors, which were rarely viewed as ‘proper plays’, because of the focus on autobiographical material, and the inclusion of such elements as pre-recorded taped voice and stylised physical actions using ‘real’ objects. Which is another way of saying that innovative though Fake It ‘Till You Make It is, it follows in a noble tradition.

So, what we get: there’s dances in underpants, silly socks and heads in baskets; slow-mo walks towards each other; jiggled signs listing symptoms, a tent erected on stage to the tune of The Carpenter’s Close To You, a whisk (her) and a hammer (him), and Japanese good-luck dolls hung around the space. There are ditties and confessions and kisses, and a bit of guitar playing. There are whole head masks that obscure Tim’s face and represent his mood swings – a head full of clouds, a horned beast, a coil of rope, a paper bag (its blankness the most disturbing of them all). When, finally, Tim appears unmasked, speaking directly into the mic rather than mediated through the recordings or through Bryony’s interpretations, it is a magical moment of pure, raw theatre.

In the interests of honesty, I feel I need to say that this isn’t my favourite piece by Bryony Kimmings – for me, that honour goes to previous work Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, which merged the personal and the political adroitly, yet maintaining a sense of artistic distance from the material that is missing here. Fake It ’Til You Make It is so rawly personal, so intimate, so tied up with the couple’s love for each other, and the onstage presence of their unborn child, that it feels impossible to engage in any sort of critical questioning of the content or delivery. Which is, perhaps, problematic.

It feels like the only reasonable response to the honesty and ‘realness’ of the show is the one that it has garnered from all quarters, so I will join others in saying that this is an important piece of work about clinical depression and masculinity, using theatre as a vehicle for the disseminating of information about the condition, by way of two people’s personal experience of this terrible curse of the modern world. And that is a valuable thing.

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Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com