THE RETURN - AT THE TOWN AND GOWN PUB THEATRE
Memories, even happy ones, don’t come in neat, bite-size packages. Driven by the motor of our minds, the recall of names, places, voices, feelings, sights and smells come at us in undisciplined waves. Memory can be still and beautiful or fragmented, disturbing and fractured. I think this is what drove the genesis of ‘The Return’. Devised by Croatian performer Natasha Stanic Mann, the one-hour piece of theatre almost defies gravity; it often defied gravitas too. Mann tells us that she is dressed as a school ma’am – blouse and sensible skirt but, significantly bare footed – in order to teach us about her native country, its bitter history, and her own coming of age in time of the break up of Yugoslavia and subsequent bitter warfare. She tells us that the turmoil robbed her of her 20s. Her bare feet a symbol of the refugee. War does that to people.
I say ‘tells us’ because for some of her energetic performance, she sits in the audience and yes, tells us stuff. She asks audience members their name but concocts answers to questions about her country in a way that fits the narrative.
I say ‘narrative’ but that is pushing it. ‘The Return’, described as a ‘collage’ is a jumble of seemingly disconnected snippets of Natasha’s life: growing up in grim Soviet-style blocks, being bullied at school, weighed down by corrupt society and an oppressive family. Each fragment is hazily signalled: one moment she is chatting to us amiably, the next microsecond, her body contorting, wrapped in a large man’s jacket, a vivid soundscape of Crotatian songs, experimental music or the wailing of wartime sirens. Later in life, in a kind of exile in Britain, she tells of her ‘beautiful country’ - she speaks her native tongue with the delicious taste of happy memory. There is a longing to return to a country that no longer exists. A yearning that cannot be fulfilled.
The piece, highly individual, personal, often funny, sometimes moving, now and again bewildering is held together by Natasa’s engagement with her story and her passion to share it with us.
Personally, I found it often very engaging, disturbing, a bit barmy and yes a little boring in places. The disconnected nature of the piece – part storytelling, part expressive dance, part stand up comedy, felt disjointed but I suspect being ‘jointed’ was the last thing the actor/writer wanted. The narrative never took on any neat coherent structure. It was like a series of scattered speech bubbles, seeds of recall scattered and broadcast over space and time. Just like memory.
