Image: supplied
The show opens with a disclaimer. ‘This is a love story,’ said performer Bryony Kimmings, in her underpants, under a spotlight. ‘I know. Gross.’
It’s a love story, but it’s a different kind of love story. It’s a story about falling in love, and a story about staying in love, but it’s also a story about the dark corners of love. It’s the story of Kimmings and her real-life fiancé Tim Grayburn, a former advertising account manager and now kind-of artist, and their struggle with his chronic depression. It’s a story about the men who suffer from mental illness, and about the women who love them.
The visual elements of the couple’s story are the bones of their day-to-day life together. Set design from Amelia Hankin and David Curtis Ring – a fortress made of sheets, and shaped like the kind of pentagonal house a child would draw – gives shape to the domesticity of love and life together, and puts this centre-stage. Grayburn’s fears that his illness would emasculate him are visible in his slow, exaggerated movements, the curved spine, a stone giant, Atlas burdened. And the everyday fear of living with chronic depression rears its literal head in the masks Grayburn wears throughout the show: clouds for its fog, scribbly rope for its confusion, a paper bag for its depersonalisation, a mythic beast for its terror.
The dangerous stigma surrounding mental illness in men is the dark matter at the heart of this show, but by no means does this mean the show is always dark. Love isn’t always dark, even when you’re sharing it with depression. There is laughter, and lots of it, from the audience and the performers. As Kimmings guides a nervous Grayburn through the show, the two slip out of their performed versions of themselves and into raw reality. The fourth wall disappears completely, and we are all part of their intimate, caring, domestic world. In it there is whimsy, and humour, and beauty, but there is also sadness and pain. Grayburn’s Duvet Song is an encapsulation of all these things, and there wasn’t a dry eye left in the house – in the audience or on the stage.
As we walk out of the theatre, Kimmings and Grayburn stand by the door, greeting us with handshakes and hugs, welcoming us as members of the same mental health tribe. At the heart of this story is love, and love is what’s going to break down the stigma surrounding mental illness and open the channels of communication.
‘If I meet me tonight, or someone who sees me in someone they know,’ saidGrayburn, mask removed, visibly nervous but staring down the audience, ‘then I’ve done what I came here to do.’
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Fake It Til You Make It
Theatreworks
Performed by: Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn
Directed by: Bryony Kimmings
Produced in Australia by: Daniel Clarke for Theatreworks
Sound design by: Tom Parkinson and Matt Lewis
Music written by: Bryony Kimmings, Tom Parkinson and Tim Grayburn
Lighting design by: Nao Nagai
Art direction by: David Curtis Ring
Costume by: David Curtis Ring and Olivia Deur
Set design by: Amelia Hankin and David Curtis Ring
Production management by: Hattie Prust
Choreographic support from: Dan Canham
Theatreworks, St Kilda
http://www.theatreworks.org.au/whatson/event/?id=239
18 March – 5 April
