Writer-performer and fringe favourite James Rowland’s six-month nationwide tour of his Songs of the Heart trilogy of storytelling pieces concludes in May. One supposes the man must be looking forward to some time off. “This show is 99.9% me”, he tells us at the outset of Stratford East’s back-to-back outing for two of the three works.
Props are indeed sparse: a white mug, a water bottle, some maps, a turntable, and a vinyl record of Beethoven. There is no set, and he only gets a chair in the second half. His costumes get no grander than a tracksuit, a t-shirt, and pyjamas. This is theatre stripped back to bare essentials. Two hours and twenty minutes of one person engaging with an audience, with an occasional musical interlude and a nod to physical theatre. By the end, the man’s straggly beard and messy hair are soaked with sweat. He must be exhausted. No wonder he munches bananas on stage during the interval.
Rowland, who simultaneously reminds one of Eddy Izzard, Woody Allen, and TV scientist Brian Cox (with a hint of Garrison Keillor thrown in for good measure), has a deceptively simple approach to storytelling. He tells small, intimate tales drawn from childhood, family, and adult experiences, imbues them with self-deprecating light and self-revealing shade, and mines them for big truths. There are diversions, digressions, and zippy one-liners along the way. Anticipate a rant at entitled public-school-educated actors and a riff on the differences between smartphones and beanbag trays. He helpfully explains letters to the Gen Zedders in the audience: “They are like Snapchats you lick.” Of his physical appearance, he says, “I am low definition, no edges”.
“What’s the offer for my audience?” Rowland asks himself, seemingly determined that we should take something from our attendance. The obvious theme connecting the lighter, more uplifting Learning to Fly and the darker, more contemplative Piece of Work is that pain and anger are indivisible from joy and happiness. You cannot have one without the other. Rowland insists Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” is too binary a choice; we must “exist in our all, the good and the bad”. It is a point well made.
Learning to Fly tells of the sickly 11-year-old Rowland growing up in Didsbury with a “stay-at-home mum and a stay-away dad”. We never quite get to the root of why the performer dislikes the memory of his father so much. For all his in-your-face trauma dumping, there are some things he holds back. Rowland’s Didsbury has “coffee shops and pushchairs as far as the eye can see”. The boy, mostly out of school with illness, spends his days reading fantasy novels and watching daytime TV. He is convinced that Anne, the withdrawn old lady who lives down the street, is a terrifying witch.
When Mum asks Anne to babysit on Wednesday afternoons, the petrified boy initially sits rigid on her living room floor, desperate to avoid her “resting disapproval face”. However, as the weeks and months go by, spurred by an unfortunate and funny incident with an overflowing toilet, the duo finds an unlikely human connection over Beethoven and sweet tea. Anne becomes “the first star in my firmament” and a navigation point as Rowland moves through adolescence. Rowland sees a reflection of himself in her loneliness and alienation from life. His attempts to assuage Anne’s pain through a visit to the “cock of the school” ecstasy dealer have results both farcical and profoundly moving.
Piece of Work, which Rowland describes as his “dead dad play”, has less of an obvious narrative throughline and feels harder to pin down. At one level, it is about the performer’s relationship with his peripatetic, adoptive younger brother Chris, who struggles with suicidal thoughts and finds it hard to settle in life. At another, it is about Chris (whose “skin blushes brown at the idea of sunlight”) and Rowland’s relationship with their different birth fathers, absent in the former’s case and unloved in the latter’s.
Rowland contextualises his understanding of father-son relationships and suicidal thoughts through reference and quotations from Hamlet, a play the writer clearly knows and loves. Though moving and boasting funny, thought-provoking, meta-theatrical edges, Rowland struggles to combine Piece of Work’s narrative and philosophical strands into a convincing ending. It feels too long, too, especially when these shows run back-to-back.
Reviewed on 16 April 2025 and continues to tour
The Reviews Hub Score
Intimate and engaging storytelling.
