Goodbye Dahling

Going in to the RSAMD, for the first time, to see a response to Sophocles’ Antigone, I had certain preconceptions. Throughout my university career I was pretty much programmed to repeat the pretentious mantra “It’s theatre studies not drama” and developed a sense of distinction of RSAMD performances being, no doubt, “drama student-ey”, an albeit rather vague quality and what it consisted of I did not quite know myself. These preconceptions were misguided, as proved to me by the students of Contemporary Performance Practice in final year student Sarah Hopfinger’s Before You Go, devised along with the four first year performers.

What Before You Go takes from Antigone, is the importance of saying goodbye, or more exactly, the social practices and conventions of saying goodbye. Antigone risks her life to bury her brother because she feels she must, it’s her moral duty to lay him to rest and formally say goodbye. In Before You Go the CPP students focus on the different ways that we view saying goodbye, and the structures in which we feel we must shape our farewells.

The performance was crammed with these influencing media, from exaggerated physical gestures, sudden performances of the Spice Girls song, Goodbye, and perfectly executed movie quotes from such films as Forest Gump and Titanic. This element of the performance was great fun, as the audience were evidently competing in the name-the-movie game, albeit silently, as judging from the staggered laughter, some guessed earlier than others. It reflected the performance as a whole; it was confidently performed with a strong sense of vitality and fun. I

t was more than just interesting and fun, as it was interspersed with individually personal moments that you knew came from the lives of the performers concerned. At the end of the performance the students bid the audience goodbye and it developed into a frenzied crescendo. The audience suddenly stopped laughing as one of the performers fell into an emotionally effecting hysteria of mourning.

I enjoyed this performance immensely, it was intelligent without being pompous or conceited, it was varied and dynamic, and in both its humour and its pain, it was human. I will no longer use the, quite frankly terrible, phrase “drama student-ey”.