Sat 27 Mar 2010, ICIA Arts Theatre
The Festival was a love story told against a backdrop of the here and now. Recent public events cause a series of coincidences to alter a discrete private world to devastating effect. As two lives cross at a festival of music and song a love story emerges that neither party can control or predict. The Festival spoke of a moment in a quiet life when suddenly all is changed, when a silent world begins to sing.
Begun with Alice Bell and continued with Daniel Hit By A Train, The Catastrophe Trilogy takes a biographical approach to theatrical story telling. It asks simply; what are the key events in a life and how do we show them, on stage, in front of other people. Answering that question enacts a sort of madness, perhaps one close to that felt by Stendhal on his unrequited love for Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski. But as a madness it is not without value, as Diane Ackerman writes in A Natural History of Love. Stendhal himself didn’t at all regret ‘the mad catastrophe of his feelings’.