Writer: Chris Thorpe
Director: Rachel Bagshaw
Pain is a unique experience, one that you can describe to others, but no one can truly experience it in quite the same way as someone else. Reimagined from his play The Shape of the Pain, Chris Thorpe along with creator and director Rachel Bagshaw have developed Where I Go (When I Can’t Be Where I Am), a 17-minute film about chronic pain, love and identity showing as part of BBC iPlayer’s Culture in Quarantine season.
A woman sits in her house recalling a recent relationship in which the experience of love develops and shifts over time. After their first night together, she finds gentle support from her new lover as she explains the sensation of her chronic pain but, later, as familiarity comes between them, the couple find that pain is the only thing that really lasts.
Where I Go (When I Can’t Be Where I Am) is an intriguing and unexpected audio-visual experience, one best experienced while wearing headphones, as the BBC iPlayer description advises. This is a monologue, told from a single perspective but Thorpe’s piece flows smoothly in and out of the Woman’s mind, mixing a narrative frame that indicates the months passing and the protagonist’s attitude with the internalised intimacy of her physical condition.
There is a poetic quality to the delivery, performed by Hannah McPake, that develops a private confederacy with the viewer, making us privy to emotional responses and sensations that even the Woman’s partner is distanced from. The way in which Thorpe charts how she is charmed initially by the sounds of his normality – cleaning his teeth or chopping a carrot – but how soon that everyday ordinariness becomes grating and limited is pointedly achieved: ‘You’re not making anything worse or better, you just are’ she exclaims.
Building on her own experience, Bagshaw then utilises a number of film and audio techniques to create a disorientated dreamlike state that pull the viewer into the consciousness of the protagonist. Solid images give way to broken and distorted graphics, the notion of the ‘maddening creatures under my skin’ and the pulling at reality are cleverly incorporated into Joshua Pharo’s visual effects that replicate the pattern of the table cloth or the looming haziness of the staircase.
Often employing horror film styling with multiple images overlapping, echo effects on the vocal track and eerie sound-scaping, created by Melanie Wilson, as well as black-out between segments, Bagshaw’s approach creates a feeling of uncontrolled sinking into the experience of pain. Other aspects of reality become distant and unreachable, the repetition of ‘I dissolve, I return’ a key phrase.
There is something about the immersive quality of live theatre that is difficult to replicate on screen and drawing the audience into the fluidity of this story is hard to achieve, but Bagshaw and Thorpe do just enough to create a sense of the pain as a constant companion. While the audience and the unseen lover may never understand quite what it feels like, its endless cycle continues.
Runs here until July 2021
The Reviews Hub Score
Unexpected
