Wednesday 31 October 2018

REVIEW: A Hundred Different Words For Love - HOME, Manchester.



'A Hundred Different Words For Love', written by and starring James Rowland and produced by Tangram Theatre, is a solo show exploring love, loss, friendship, and the stories they leave behind. There’s no set, just Rowland and a keyboard and amplifier onstage for one hour. As the performance begins, Rowland informs the audience that, “I’m going to tell a story and none of it is true.” This may be the case or it may actually have some root in lived truth (as all the best stories do); the fact that the character narrating this story is also called James leaves open the question that it may, indeed, be based on real-life events.

The narrative of the show intercuts between James (the character) preparing to be the ‘Best Man of Honour’ at the wedding of his best friend Sarah to her fiancée Emma and recounting how he met and began a relationship with the woman who may have been the love of his life. The wedding sections are backed by fragments of a song played on the keyboard and then looped through an effects pedal, which frees Rowland up to move away from the keyboard and perform getting on and off the tube, going up to his flat, grabbing carrier bags of Viennetta out of the freezer, calling a taxi, and slumping in front of the freezer in order to segue into the story of how he met ‘the woman.’ James states that he isn’t going to tell the audience her name or describe how she looks. Instead he encourages the audience to take a moment to close their eyes and imagine her, presumably to make the story more personally involving; the audience will have more of a feeling of ownership if ‘the woman’ is someone they have imagined.

After recounting his clumsy attempts at trying to get the woman to go out with him, eventually succeeding, he moves the narrative forward to six months into the relationship where the woman tells him she loves him; James, however, leaves it too long to return the sentiment and admits that he never told her he loved her. The next narrative leap is two years on and they have split up – and this moment leads to some of Rowland’s more affecting lines as he remarks that, “There’s no joy like making someone you love happy,” and stated, with an air of mournful regret, that he didn’t even cry after the break-up, leaving his “heart drowning in the tears I couldn’t shed.” In between these two poetic statements, Rowland brings some levity to the situation by explaining that they broke up because he never looks to the future and demonstrating how ‘Future James’ hates ‘Past James’ because ‘Past James’ is too busy enjoying the moment. To provide a concrete example, Rowland proceeded to empty a bottle of water over his head and said he was enjoying it, until after the bottle was empty and a few beats had passed, at which point he was now “cold, wet, and thirsty.”

As the narrative catches up to the present of the wedding, Rowland introduces some other characters into the story, namely his best friend Sarah’s father, Giles, who doesn’t agree with his daughter’s lifestyle choices, and Sarah’s Nan, who is in her eighties, has had hip replacements, gets the best lines, and sounds like a fantastic person (if she is real, and even if she isn’t, that assertion still holds true). Rowland is given the chance to take off his soaking suit and dons a dress, as James does in the narrative, as Sarah’s ‘Best Man of Honour’ which he spends the remainder of the show in. With ‘the woman’ being a mutual friend of Sarah’s, she appears at the wedding and James and her share a few civil words with one another, James finally admitting to her that he loved her and her replying simply, “I know.” The story ends there, no happy ending but no tragedy, either. Rowland performs the song he wrote for the wedding and had been playing fragments of throughout the show and brings the performance to a conclusion.

As a performer, Rowland is engaging but doesn’t take himself too seriously; with his verbosity, he does come across as a more amiable Boris Johnson crossed with any of the characters portrayed by Hugh Grant in those rom-com movies written by Richard Curtis. The structure of the piece is tight and the story, irrespective of whether it is true or not, is universal enough to strike a chord with most viewers. 'A Hundred Different Words For Love' may not be the most radical, convention-shaking piece of theatre, but it is certainly the most human. Funny and bittersweet, it is well worth investing an hour in.

Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on -  30/10/18

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