Do You Remember That This Is The Play I Was Telling You About – Hen & Chickens Theatre, Highbury & Islington (Camden Fringe)

Reviewer: Christine Stanton

Writer: Piero Grandinetti

“Confusing & Unsatisfying ”

1 / 5

Four performers, four stories and an hour of surreal scenes – this show is a combination of strange interactions and hallucinogenic style dream sequences.  

As a concept, this show has a lot of creative opportunity – the chance to experiment with a variety of styles and combine the imagination of each individual involved, but on execution, this unfortunately doesn’t translate to the stage at all. The show begins with two children (Michael Jempeji & Lynn Grandinetti) on a beach, finding a key amongst some items and excitedly continuing onto a treasure hunt. It then jumps to a man (Piero Grandinetti) waking up late for work, rushing through his routine while people around him dance excitedly before he shoos them away. Then we’re in a seemingly haunted house, with a ghost (Penny Klein) reciting the lyrics to Moon River and mumbling about her expectations for her life. There are multiple other scenes like this – all jumbled and confusing, quickly moving from one thing to the next with no real link.  

It’s unclear whether these scenes are supposed to be standalone sketches or if they are all supposed to come under the same narrative umbrella, but for an audience, it’s confusing and unsatisfying, with no real explanation. Are all these scenes a bonkers dream sequence? Is this supposed to be another realm? Is it just a continuation of children imaginatively playing out a variety of games? The whole hour is spent trying to make sense of the scenes, but although the blurb mentions that there are twists and turns – it’s hard to work them out if the premise itself is so confusingly executed.  

Aside from being actors, the cast also identify as an artist, a dancer and a clown – it would be great to see some of these individual skills be showcased more, and incorporate them into the narrative to really put a spotlight on some of the creative outlets that the cast are part of. Each performer also gets a chance to tell their own solo story – these range from poignant reminiscing about an old pet, to explaining how they came down from the moon and impregnated their mother through her nasal passage. Some of these stories come across as strange hallucinogenic ramblings and also don’t really have any coherence about them – which is really disappointing because these could be incorporated to either tie everything else together, or be used as a platform to champion each individual performer.  

The lighting (Venus Raven) and sound design (Jim Whitcher) are great at creating and changing the ever-changing various atmospheres throughout the show. This is a performance we really wanted to enjoy but struggled to grasp what was going on too much to be able to get behind it, but there will definitely be people out there that better embrace the madcap randomness and confusion that embodies the show.  
 
Runs until 14 August 2023