Writer: Henry Madd
Director: Nic Connaughton
You city folk may never fully understand. Growing up with more than one option for public transport, a world of options for places to go after school or at the weekend with friends, and even street lamps that illuminate wherever it is you want to go.
A rural childhood can be a beautiful thing: fields, cows, fresh air and all that bucolic glory. But it can also mean isolation, stagnation and crushing boredom which leads to dysfunction and potential mental health and substance abuse issues.
The power, the glory, and the ugliness of life in a small town that ties an elastic to the heart and draws you back incessantly is on show in Land of Lost Content by spoken word artist and poet Henry Madd. Staged as a hometown pub conversation between two childhood friends that ranges from past triumphs, past difficulties, local characters, shared mates and current troubles it’s a wonderfully accessible and evocative piece.
Bursting with a richness of language and expression, Madd and his co-performer Darragh Hand deliver a mixed show with theatre and spoken word elements that brings home the trouble and danger modern rural life can mean. Over beers they reminisce and run through unplanned teenage camping trips, dangerous drink driving times, drug problems, early and innocent love and both of their suicide attempts. This is not the land of the WI and berry-picking through the brambles, it’s a town that prosperity forgot and the production does an excellent job of balancing the good and bad about a life formed here.
Simply staged in Donald Marshall’s inventive set, with accessories to their various vignettes hidden among the foamy floor, there’s no distraction from Madd’s words. It all combines to strike a bittersweet note. An hour of adventure we’re glad to have had but one that leaves us bereft of the comfortable ignorance of rural struggles we once may have enjoyed.
Runs until 12 February 2022
