THEATRE REVIEW: How You Gonna Live Your Dash

HOW You Gonna Live Your Dash is a curious title, but is actually a very poignant and thought-provoking one.

THEATRE REVIEW:

HOW YOU GONNA LIVE YOUR DASH

at Cast in Doncaster

On a gravestone or memorial, a person’s birth date and death date are separated by a small hyphen, the dash referred to here, so how should you live that period between your birth and demise?

This imaginative and interesting two-hander, performed by Jenna Watt and Ashley Smith, is at times funny, at times surreal and at times sad as it probes the aspects of life which make it less than fulfilling.

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Marriage blues, a dreary job, a deep desire to make a big change – they are all considered in what could be seen as a succession of ‘sketches’, with a fair few pyrotechnics thrown in.

Jenna and Ashley work hard to keep the show moving and absorbing and it covers a lot of ground in its relatively concise 55 or so minutes.

Jenna, in particular, could be said to put herself through the mill for this show. Whether it is stuffing her mouth with an unfeasibly large amount of breakfast cereal or being covered in purple powder as she blows puffs of something messy out of a funnel whilst lying on her back, she gets full marks for commitment.

It’s a heavy subject but there are some very amusing moments, such as a section about health and safety made indecipherable by the breathing masks the rules force them to wear. It ends up getting sillier and sillier and is almost Pythonesque in its way.

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A look at exercise also gets a laugh, especially exercises for the face which allowed the two actors to do their best gurning.

But pieces about a man trying to break out of his boring lifestyle and attempts to say what a worker really feels about his tedious job are more sensitively done. 

One character’s complete inability to say what he or she wants to say when holding a microphone, with the sound of a scratched record in the background, hits hard and is almost painful to watch. 

Then the play ends with a strip of material – a dash of material – slowly burning from one end to the next where it explodes into nothingness. That says it all. That’s a life – how was it lived?

A top production which shows what the more experimental end of the theatrical spectrum can do. Powerful and poignant.

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