Luca Rutherford in Learning How To Die, on at Northern Stage.
Luca Rutherford tells us that over 56 million people die every year. Boiled down, that’s 1.8 people per second. She sets away a counter which projects onto the back wall a steadily rising total. Over 6,000 people will die during the course of her solo show tonight, which teems with huge and in many ways unanswerable questions about how we might accept the infinite conditions of our own finite lives. How do we make sense of the data of death, the many millions of people whose lives end and whose death impacts on millions more? The method by which we shrink that total is through telling intimate, documented stories.
Six years ago, Rutherford’s father was diagnosed with cancer, which began, as she explains, not a process of grief but one of learning to accept the certainty, or the finality, of his illness. Then, last year, and without warning, a friend of hers lost her life. She draws a neat metaphor between comprehending the appalling strangeness or chaos of death and the art of skipping: if you dwell on how to keep going, the rope will nick your toes and you’ll have to start all over again. But distract your mind away from the rhythm of the swing and you’re more likely to maintain momentum. So this show and the space it creates is as much an opportunity for her to put down the rope and ask us to reflect and share in her experience of figuring it out.
Consequently, we aren’t taken on the type of hyper-sensory journey that Chris Brett Bailey bruised us with. His hellish locomotive monologue sent us hurtling toward death at warp speed, battering us with the final crescendo before a guaranteed and sudden silence. Rutherford’s dialogue is quieter and less fantastical, and it could even be seen as an antithesis to Bailey’s solo blockbuster, as Learning How to Die instead grapples with understanding our own mortality through intimate acts of public sharing. The show asks us to help her fill the space between statistics and individual experience, privacy and openness, certainty and spontaneity. The drama is in watching Rutherford confront her own fluctuating emotions about death amidst an ordinary life of worrying about bills, which doesn’t always make for great theatre, as there aren’t many opportunities to create and develop tension, but it packs a meaty punch all the same.
Rutherford partitions the show with recorded conversations in which her father explains the cascading, surreal concerns one encounters during terminal illness. This great and terrifying knowledge clashes with wondering what to have for dinner that night. Rutherford attempts to reduce the gap between these thoughts right here in the space with us, which is often a joy to watch for its depth of feeling and sheer ambition. But there is sometimes little for us to fully latch on to. As this story is often told, that same partitioning of plot also comes across as slightly painstaking; perhaps there is a greater balance to be found in how this subject matter is performed. That being said, we are slowly cooked and configured over the course of sixty minutes, our vulnerabilities mingling together as we learn to have this conversation in full view of each other, and it’s one which beautifully bubbles over by the end.
Learning How To Die was on at Northern Stage. Click here for more of their programme.
