An Accident/ A life

In past reviews for this year, I've commented on the positives derived from the inventive parsimony that the festival has had to adopt,and I stand by those comments - limited budgets has meant a greater emphasis on imagination and creativity. However, sometimes there's no substitute for a big show, something offered by An Accident/ A life, notwithstanding it's intimate subject matter. Huge video screens, onto which a mix of recorded and live images were projected, dominated the stage. Dazzling lighting complemented sound and smoke effects. Bodies dropped from out of the sky. And then there was the small matter of a full sized car, suspended and revolving perilously close to Marc Brew's head. Viewed as pure spectacle, this was the kind of grandstanding show not seen at the festival for years, thankfully forestalling what had been a shrinking theatrical component. The bigger question, however, is whether that spectacle served the show's strong autobiographical content.

In 1997 dancer Marc Brew was involved in a headlong car crash while travelling in South Africa. The offending drunk driver walked away with little more than a damaged knee, while Brew's companions all died. The play, however, barely touched on the backstory to this tragedy, because it wasn't what the play was about. Instead, it examined the consequent life lived by the so called lucky survivor. Brew ended up a paraplegic, having come perilously close to death himself, and we are taken from the side of the road in which he dragged himself, through cardiac arrest, towards painful recovery and an uncertain future weighed down by survivor guilt and a body that was no longer willing to co-operate.

The production certainly distinguishes itself with considerable showmanship. Brew was flanked by anonymous crash test dummies who operated a live camera feed that poked and prodded into the most intimate moments of horror. Frequent costume changes punctuate the episodic nature of the narrative, told with simplicity and candour that dared to invite critical judgement rather than cloying, empathetic sympathy, As Brew painfully crawled about the stage, dragging his useless legs behind him or contorting them into impossible configurations, we were offered a simple, yet shocking, reminder that this what a person looks like without the wheel chair that able bodied folk see as a part of them, but which isn't a part of them..

For the most part, we were kept at an emotional distance throughout, and quite rightly so. Notwithstanding the theatrical flourishes, Brew's workmanlike delivery had a documentary feel to it. It was as if he dared us to presume we can fully understand his suffering and trauma, which of course we can't. This was no cry for help, and certainly wasn't a wallow in regret at opportunity lost. Rather it was an illustration of a journey too often ignored, of life immediately after an accident, yet before resolution. It was telling that when resolution finally came, in the shape of his winged chariot of a wheel chair, we finally got to see the man fly, dancing on wheels as he once did on legs.

The question remains, I suppose, how strong a piece of pure theatre this was. I doubt it would have had the same impact if it was fictional or had been true but performed by someone else. What if Marc's role had been taken by an able bodied person? Does the work stand on its own, to coin a phrase, or would that have been an outrage akin to blacking up for Othello? In an age when reality TV is singularly denigrated as the lowest level of entertainment it is straightforwardly curious that theatre increasingly relies on the reality of what is expressed on stage to bolster its impact. I can only say that, devoid of navel gazing self-pity, Marc Brew has created something that is both stunning to watch and life affirming, with an abiding message that life does and can go on, even after the most terrible of events changes that life forever. And that is a sentiment we can all embrace and empathise with.