Accidental Nostalgia

There’s something slightly amiss about Cameron Seymour’s lecture on her forthcoming psychology book, How to Change Your Mind: A Self-Help Manual for Psychogenic Amnesiacs. Sure, the slideshow presentation is all present and correct and the bored, flat and disinterested tone of the timid academic is perfectly familiar. But, she’s wearing mismatched shoes. And kneepads…

And then she breaks into song.

Accidental Nostalgia is the latest work from New York based artist Cynthia Hopkins. It is a post-modern, multi-media and defiantly unique production that combines country music, textbook psychology and a twisting, turning amnesiac storyline. As the lecture format that opens this production fades away into a (only slightly more) straight operetta, so Accidental Nostalgia morphs into a rather intriguing whodunit.

While Accidental Nostalgia succeeds in creating an edgy and, frankly, disconcerting atmosphere quite unlike anything I’ve so far come across this August, one can’t help but get the impression that it thinks itself much smarter than it actually is. Convoluted though its plot is, it is never really hard to follow (and everything is neatly explained and summarized, negating the need for “[de]ciphering the plot for days after leaving the theatre” as the advertising blurb would have one believe).

Moreover the stage direction can, at times, be rather clumsy. One particular example sees Hopkins almost complete hidden behind two projection screens, to the point where she is invisible to everybody in the upper rows. But the biggest problem, overall, is that the play is much too narcissistic to be truly involving; its protagonist too flat, frankly too odd, to be sympathetic. And after an hour and twenty minutes of rather disorientating theatre, one leaves feeling pretty unmoved.