Writer: Luca Rutherford
Director: Iain Bloomfield
Reviewer: Paul Couch
Death seems to be a popular topic at this year’s Pulse Festival. Amid several other entries on the same subject, Luca Rutherford’s piece Learning How to Die offers us an alternative to moping about in hushed tones waiting for the Grim Reaper to come a-knocking.
But this is no exploration of grief nor soul-searching all the ifs and what-ifs we all resort to after the passing of a loved one. Instead, Rutherford focuses our attention on the undeniable fact that death is an inevitability for all of us, it’s just a matter of when rather than if.
She cites her father being diagnosed with terminal cancer (the “dying”) and the day she found that a friend had been aboard the Germanwings Flight 9525 that crashed into the Alps in 2015 (the “dead”).
Does knowing that we have a finite time left on the planet change our perspectives? Rutherford hands out cardboard luggage labels, upon which is written random numbers – the number of days that she suggests each member of the audience might have left to live and what they would do if that were the case. It’s an interesting experiment, some are gifted numbers in the high thousands – pity those who get single figures or even zero.
One the way into the auditorium, we are asked to fill in pieces of papers that ask about our last pointless argument, how we’d like to be remembered, etc. This exercise is perhaps less successful as the often comedic responses detract from the overall poignancy of the piece.
Learning How To Die isn’t new writing per se it’s been around in one form or another for a couple of years. It still needs polish but, at its heart, it’s a laudable piece of theatre that plays its part in bursting the balloon of the last great taboo.
Reviewed on 4 June 2017
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