Writer: Hannah Caplan
Director: Douglas Clarke-Wood
The line between fiction and biography may be getting increasingly blurred, with true stories often turning out to be only loosely based on real events and works of fiction bearing a closer resemblance to true life stories than writers willingly admit to. This is Not About Me places these contradictions centre stage with a parallel narrative of a writer fictionalising her relationship for a stage play at the same time as scenes from the play are acted out.
Eli and Grace are the characters being written about. There is a reference to this not being their real names, but there is also an absence of their real names. The real and fictional versions are played by the same actors, with Amaia Naima Aguinaga as Grace who is also the writer and Francis Nunnery as Eli and his real-life counterpart.
The question of whether the writer is editing or altering the relationship for the sake of her script, is simply giving her own version of events, or is someone who sees the act of rewriting as serving a cathartic purpose as she rationalises what happened, can probably be answered with; all of the above.
The honesty in Hannah Caplan’s own writing means that the scenes covering the writers craft and motivations are the wittiest and best observed sections of the play, steering away from the often pretentious, self-aggrandising nature of scripts where writers write about writers.
The scenes in the fictional version are at their most effective when they reduce the trappings and proclamations of love down to the subtext that lies behind them. The contrast between Aguinaga’s reductionist delivery and Nunnery’s more defensive, aggrieved stance works superbly and serves as a reminder that the fictional Eli is someone who has to be seen through the eyes of the real Grace.
At times, the lines between the two narrative strands get a little too blurred, and Douglas Clarke-Wood’s direction almost too successful in making a seamless transition between the real and imagined worlds of the play. The fictional Grace can become too much of an observer rather than a participant, while the real-life Eli can seem like someone who is performing someone else’s take on him. In a longer format, the two halves of the story may become more defined in their own right, at the moment, while their co-existence works well as an exploration of the writer’s craft, they are less effective at charting the course of a relationship.
Runs until 25 2025
