Creator: Sam Ipema
Director: James Meteyard
Sam Ipema’s Dear Annie, I Hate You at Riverside Studios is an astonishing feat of storytelling, drama, comedy and full-on experiential theatre. Ipema, as creator, mines her blistering experience of being diagnosed at 20 with a life-threatening brain aneurysm. What for most of us is unimaginable is made surreally real, thanks to Ipema’s witty capturing of moments from her life, briskly and somehow charmingly presented by director and dramaturg James Meteyard.
Snatches of video footage show Sam and her beloved brother Mika as innocent children, playing out their fantasies of superheroes. We hear the real voices of her parents making decent attempts to make sense of the situation. Ipema blends this with some impressive physical theatre – we can really believe in her early passion for soccer – and her cool, self-deprecating observations. The show is often laugh-out-loud funny. There isn’t a drop of self-pity.
Then there’s a colourful assortment of friends, frenemies and hopeless boyfriends. Faced with the facts of Sam’s condition, they are at first curious – is she coming back to school? Will she still be going to college? – and then self-regarding – is a brain aneurysm contagious? Finally, most are just too awed and disturbed to support her. They fail to visit her in hospital and turn away from her when she gets out. The comedy fades dim for a while as Sam feels at her most acutely lonely.
We’re taken deep into her experience of abnormal brain activity thanks to the wizardry of video and sound design (Dan Balfour, Douglas Coghlan and Dan Light). Her brain seizures are vividly suggested by disturbing electronic images, unpredictable lights and sounds. A spring break party is rendered nightmarish by cacophonous music and unintelligible voices as Sam lurches towards insensibility.
The Dear Annie of the title is a fabulous creation. All glamour and pizzazz, Annie is the irrepressible embodiment of the aneurysm itself. Played with enormous zest by Eleanor House, she is totally without inhibitions, bursting into torch songs without a by-your-leave, and voicing the unspeakable. In one of the show’s wilder moments, Annie shamelessly conducts a game show. Will Sam choose a) have surgery – and you might die? Or b) not have surgery – and you might die? Or c) get run over by a bus? The hilarity somehow intensifies the awful absurdity of Sam’s choices. Then, as the mood darkens, Sam is overcome by fury, resorting to terrifying violence towards Annie.
Halfway through, Sam opts for brain surgery. Small computer screens show just-about-bearable glimpses of a real-life operation which really takes us there. We hear the grinding of saws as bone and muscle are pulled apart. We’re made aware of the painfully slow period of recuperation, most of it spent in a state of disorientation and pain. On the small screen, her surgeon dispassionately reels off a chilling list of possible side-effects – blindness, seizures, loss of speech, loss of memory.
For all this, Dear Annie, I Hate You is far from bleak. The fact that the vibrant Sam Ipema is there before us reassures us that she’s survived all that life has thrown at her. Her story is remarkable, the show a remarkably exhilarating experience.
Runs until 1 June 2025
