The Pain of Rebirth: Cycles of Remembrance and Grief in Réquiem
Words by Hugh Offor (he/him)
Images: Lucille Bonne & Copper Taylor-Bogaars
There is a particular type of silence that I have come to associate with grief. A sort of emptiness slips into the space between syllables.
Unsettled, we turn to the arguably more essential forms of speech: tears, laughter, varied paralanguage, and so too the absence of all these. Even these more essential gestures cannot shake this silence, that mutes their noise, or sharpens it to absurdity, or leaves it entirely lacking. When the noise dies down, there is only an insistent quiet.
The theatre during Lucy “Lui” Eidelson's Réquiem was filled with this silence. Not only from the subject of the performance itself, but so too echoed in the sighs and occasional chuckles of the audience—and, in their quiet. Réquiem is a masterwork of sympathetic art that is as heartbreaking as it is stunning.
The authentic experience of the playwright is well expressed, captivating the audience in their own lives, infecting them with that same silence. Turgenev wrote that “Death is an old story, but each individual encounters it anew”. This ‘old story’ has found itself a new form in this production.
Réquiem is Eidelson’s second major theatre production, following Air Hunger at Abbotsford Convent for the 2023 Melbourne Fringe. All facets of direction from design to choreography and sound play with a sense of unease and surreality. Intrigue builds from the first step into the theatre, presented with a fabric womb hung from a wooden tripod, and backed by the ambiguous thrum of Noah Riseley’s soundscape.
The chorus join the audience in the classical sense, caring for the again-infant Lucy, dressing her, sweeping the vestiges of her rebirth onto the mound beneath the womb. They are however, like the audience, ultimately powerless, and cannot but look on as she continues her cycle of remembrance and grief. Their songs (composed by Sam Harding) are lamenting, full of pain and knowledge of the cycle’s tragic repetition.
The mound itself is emblematic of the success of both the visual and narrative dimensions of the performance. At first glance, it is indistinct: a nearly colourless grey beneath the red of the suspended womb, with a texture that could be sand. With some foreknowledge of the performance’s content, one may assume it was ashes.
At the appropriate moment in the narrative, the lights change hue, and its true nature is revealed: Weetbix, fed to the father by the caregiving Lucy, then crumbled by him onto her foetal form in the last stages of the performance.
Returning to Turgenev: the Weetbix and their complete specificity to a particular memory is the sort of originality that gives the performance such richness. The implication that it is this specific memory that is being returned to each cycle is nothing short of devastating.
Eidelson and her father stand-in Allen Laverty’s performances excelled. I reflect on a particular moment when the adult-playing-child Lucy stands atop Laverty’s back, and his muscles visibly shake as he fights to support the adult weight. This struggle perfectly expresses his love for Lucy, foreshadows his coming decline in health, and further heightens the sense of wrongness that comes from an adult in the place of child, and the accompanying physical disruption it causes on their counterpart in remembrance.
The following movement, where Eidelson slips down to lay back-to-back against the bent over Laverty, was astonishing in its fluidity. The emotional closeness between father and child was palpable, and is emblematic of the particular physical sort of love many fathers share with their children. Eidelson, choreographer Lily Harding, and dramaturge Bridie Noonan’s balancing of closeness and distance in the performance is exceptional. Physical harmony and dissonance become devices to express closeness and emotional turmoil. The earliest section of Eidelson and Laverty’s performance is pure mimesis of the playful, earnest type between parent and child—early life in its shared moments.
As the father’s health declines, the time spent out of sync increases, though returns subtly in moments of great closeness such as the father falling asleep on the couch next to Eidelson, where she mimics his head-rested-on-hand position.
I note in the performance a return of Eidelson’s concern with a loss of bodily certainty, which featured in their Air Hunger and its focus on experiences of chronic illness. Watching the recently reborn Eidelson flop around on stage, grappling with their belligerent limbs, I reflected on having paralysed part of my leg some years ago. There is a particular unease aroused by having a part of yourself previously assumed compliant suddenly refuse to obey commands.
It brings with it an alienation from a self previously assumed contiguous. The jerking movements of Eidelson’s physical fight against their fractured self put motion to this sensation in a way I had not yet fully appreciated. The loss of control returned appropriately in the later stages of the performance’s narrative, when active grief became the central focus. Returning to the choreography, the contrast between the opening movements’ fluidity and the collapse into grief is stark.
It was a privilege to sit in this room of mourners and both grieve with the subject of the performance, but so too appreciate the love she expresses.
To me, this is the heart of Réquiem’s achievement: Eidelson addresses some of the most isolating experiences in their life, and simultaneously treats them with tenderness and appreciation. Réquiem is full of love, for without love there can be no loss. I welcome the prospect of future performances, and I will be in attendance.