Well versed... Love, Loss & Chianti, Riverside Studios

Can't you now somehow contrive

to be both dead and alive?

The first part of this dramatized compilation of Christopher Reid’s poetry starts off with one of the most forensically calm descriptions of the moment of loss you’ll find. For anyone who has been with a loved one during the moments of their death, Reid’s ability to capture the moment is fearless and kind. I’d hang a positive review upon that opening engagement and the eloquence that linked the entire audience. But, Love, Loss & Chianti is truly a play of two halves and after the seriousness of A Scattering you’re left punch-drunk by a bravura performance of self-loathing from Robert Bathurst as a fifty-something copy editor, part time poet and full-time fantasist trying to rekindle lost love  with his ex, played by Rebecca Johnson who looks on aghast as The Song of Lunch turns out to be a drunken lament.

Reid wrote A Scattering in response to his wife’s death and the day after he finished, he wrote The Song of Lunch looking for “a light farce” that might provide an antidote for three years of grief. You can see why the two work so well together and why Bathurst was so passionate about bringing them to the stage. You have to face your grief but you also need to laugh again and it is a joy to watch Bathurst and Johnson addressing such divergent emotion with such skill and grace; they have a great chemistry and you sense the leveraging of their mature experience as they deliver Reid’s poetry as naturally as prose; something I imagine is just as hard to do with comedy as with tragedy.

Robert Bathurst and Rebecca Johnson (all photographs Alex Harvey-Brown)

After its humbling opening A Scattering addresses the jumbled narrative of a mind in grief. The poem was written in four parts, the first of which was written whilst Reid’s wife Lucinda was still alive and they were on holiday in Crete. The poetry touches on the joys and sadness of this last opportunity and the ability we all have to allow those extreme emotions to co-exist. Bathurst plays with care and gives a dignity to Reid’s words just as Johnson gives full life to Lucinda, a woman of fierce energy who the poet wonders, was able to do two or three things at once even learning Greek as she exercised on a static bike. Why, he wonders, could she not also be dead and alive?

The words are honest and forthright and they also skilfully avoid self-pity and attempt a constructed view of reconciled loss and humanity. Lucinda may be gone but, having donated her body to science, the poet likes to walk past the facility where his wife now works, helping perhaps, to cure the disease that took her from him.

Seriously, though, what will they say when they look back at our demythologised age?

The Song of Lunch is a journey from disappointed sobriety to drunken delusion and anyone who has seen Mr Bathurst’s work knows that this is well within his range. This is the funniest poetry I’ve seen for some time and the narrative journey is so well paced as our hero goes for broke in a reunion lunch with his ex-lover.

He selects the Italian restaurant in Soho where they used to go, 7, 10, 15 years ago and finds it changed just as the rest of the area has been, almost all interest driven out by rising rents and corporate creep. He missed the endless lunches of the old days as most of us do in publishing… personally I connected a lot with this sequence! I do remember the eighties…

Sadly the restaurant is no longer what it was and even the old bottles of Chianti no longer come in their raffia enclosures, whilst old Italian waiters have been replaced by young people from everywhere and the clientele are made up of boozy boys from Wardour Street ad agencies.

Out to lunch at his own lunch?!

As his ex arrives, Rebecca Johnson dressed to impress, as a well-off Parisian housewife, with two sons and married to Bathurst’s nemesis, a successful author. As the two fail to connect the Chianti flows one way and our hero’s inner dialogue gets more and more deranged as his shots get longer and longer. It’s a masterclass in comedy with a heart and, again, a situation many have found ourselves in, not so much drunk and disorderly in Soho than disappointed and disconnected; much in need of a rude awakening.

Jason Morell directs and allows his players to make full use of the Riverside’s space as well as the gift of Reid’s verse. Charles Peattie’s innovative animations are also very striking as they are projected in sympathy on the back wall of the stage. The designs are more abstract for the first part and amusingly specific for the drunken lunch showing in desperate caricature, the drunken illusions of our self-punishing poet. Priest clearly wanted to make himself the butt of his own joke.

IThankYou Theatre rating: **** An outstanding double-header from two fine actors at the top of their game bringing the sometimes-painful truths of Reid’s poetry to life in front of our very eyes.

Love, Loss and Chianti plays at the Riverside until Sunday 17^th May and, as a publishing professional for over thirty years… I would urge you all to go and see it. Details on the Riverside website. They have a great view of the Thames as well.

But Soho itself has changed,
the speciality food shops
pushed out of business,
tarts chased off the streets,
and a new kind of trashiness
moving in:
cultureless, fly-by-night.