Lorna Irvine reviews a production filled with 'absorbing and powerful' stories about kindness.
Rachel Jury, bathed in a single spotlight, is on a mission: 'to bad-ass up kindness.’ She elucidates that kindness has a 'saccharine, happy-clappy image,’ and she wants to make it cool, not cruel, to be kind. Taking as her cue the philosophy of Viktor E Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust (and who believed in finding meaning through the most brutal of circumstances), she has spoken with asylum seekers as part of her theatre practice. This is a one-woman monologue with a panoply of voices.
An immensely charismatic and likeable performer, Jury creates a kind of conspiratorial intimacy, like a big sister swapping secrets in a summer tent. She imitates the mannerisms and cadences of those shaped by surviving terrible poverty, domestic violence, abuse and war—some youthful, some older. From India to Yugoslavia, the Sudan to the UK, she shows how kindness can be found in the most unlikely of sources.
Small acts can have an immense impact—from a cancer sufferer in Belgrade just having a listening ear, to providing education in Africa. Threaded throughout the performance is her own story—of her family who swerved between being, as she wryly puts it, 'nouveau riche and nouveau poor again,' and how her father, whose genes she believes she mostly inherited, was unremittingly kind—almost to a fault. She ponders kindness as something genetically inherited—like body types, beliefs or a sense of humour. She also adds, with a twinkle, that she knew how to exploit her father's kindness, as illustrated by asking for an expensive toy Womble as a child. Once attained, of course, the cuddly Orinoco was rarely played with.
Breathlessly spanning the globe, Jury's stories are absorbing and powerful, harrowing and hopeful accounts alike brought to vivid life. There is, she suggests, always someone there, even in adversity. Her sentiments could not be more timely—as America mourns yet again more African American residents, Greece's banking crisis deepens, and thousands march in Britain against austerity, A Thousand Kindnesses brings positivity into the space for one whole hour—until we are spat back out onto the street again, and the trials of our own little lives.
Run at the Tron Theatre ended.
RSS