Creator: Ru Lawrence
Director: Jack McKee
Ru Lawrence’s new 55-minute physical theatre piece G R I E F C A S E examines the spaces between the public performance of loss and the overwhelming, even consumingly complex emotions experienced in private. Using physical theatre, mime and dance blended with scripted scenes, there are nods to Gecko Theatre Company’s best work in the application of storytelling through physical movement, and some of the most successful elements of Lawrence’s piece are the scenes that have no words at all as lead character G confronts the various expectations placed upon them.
Busy at work and having to keep up with their corporate colleagues, G avoids calls from the hospital about their mother’s decline. When she dies soon after, G struggles to contain the array of emotions they feel while trying to reconcile their estranged relationship. Forced to confront memories and projections as well as endure everyday scenarios with sister Lucy, G tries to make it through to the funeral.
G R I E F C A S E sets out a more nuanced response to the death of a parent than the subject matter normally delivers, avoiding any sentimentality with an arguably more candid assessment of the internal conflicts, guilt and frustration that come from a lifelong and troubled mother-child connection. That this remains unresolved becomes part of G’s trauma as feelings of neglect, abandonment and embarrassment at their mother’s alcoholism commingle with some moving post-death conversations with her in which G imagines the physical and emotional affection from her they never received in life.
Most of this is told through an evocative blend of mime and dance choreographed by Lawrence, the primary language of G R I E F C A S E being physical rather than verbal form. Performed in traverse at The Hope Theatre, this 55-minute piece opens with an energetic party with work colleagues that blends into routines, more nights out and the swirl of G’s life delivered with verve by the cast, accompanied by an eclectic but meaningful soundtrack. These contrast with darker-toned moments of crushing and destabilising sadness as G feels the weight of their pain and the expectation of others to be ‘fine’ weighing down on them. And in these transitions between real life, intense sadness, exterior and interior being, the show is at its strongest.
The concept loses a little traction towards the end as it searches for a conclusion, and here it is clear that the writing is less confident than when G R I E F C AS E is expressing character identities and experiences through mime/dance, and as those segments become more infrequent, the story’s grip loosens. The continual appearance of Collette Hodson’s Mum as both a memory and a projection of the woman that never was is valuable, but this final chapter could say more about the conflicted legacy that this mother leaves on her children.
Performed by Lawrence as G, alongside Poppy Janisch as sister Lucy and Jack St Leger as Garry, as well as playing G’s dismissive corporate colleagues, G R I E F C A S E looks honestly at all the ways loss can manifest and how a single relationship can change across a lifetime. And in a situation where it can be difficult or impossible to articulate all the things you feel, Lawrence’s expressive choreography says it all.
Runs until 3 October 2026
