Eileen Mahoney welcomes us to her loft. A full loft, containers large and small neatly packed under the eaves, filled over time, over decades.
It takes time and effort to collect things, and even more to clear them out. One approach is Swedish Death Cleaning, aimed at decluttering to make it easier for your family once you are gone. It’s not exactly a “hygge” idea and our present selves even avoid the D word.
Much of her, let’s call it a collection for now, came after the death of her father and clearing out brings her into contact with four generations of a family of board game inventers and self-published writers. Chronicles show time spent playing a cricket game so engrossing that the players come out to bat at sunset even though it only exists on paper or locked down during the “buzz bomb summer” of 1944.
But what to do with all these things, she can’t throw them away, or can she?
This spoken word piece is presented in a documentary style, interspersed with video interviews and PowerPoint type slides. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the work of Dave Gorman, but with a gentler humour rather than being played for laughs.
She looks at the benefits and potential pitfalls of digitising, a new hobby of re-creating photos, collecting and hoarding and shot through it all is memory and our emotional attachment to physical things.
It’s a warm telling of a deeply personal history that might appeal most to people of the Boomer generation. Sound contends with equipment noise in the small theatre space and could be improved, and at least one of the videos would benefit from subtitles.
This modest show is a pleasant diversion from clearing out the loft.
Show Times: 14 – 19, 21 – 26 August 2023 at 11:40am.
Tickets: £8 booked (or pay what you want at venue).
Suitability: 0+