Review: CASSIE WORKMAN - ABERDEEN, Soho Theatre

Photo credit: Jake Bush

Multi-award-winning comedian and storyteller Cassie Workman takes the audience on a poetic journey through the space time continuum on a mission to save Nirvana’s former frontman and member of the ‘27 Club’, Kurt Cobain, from himself in Aberdeen.

Workman is an accomplished storyteller and spoken word artist, wheeling the audience away from the blank space of the undecorated set to the grim, rain-drenched Aberdeen, Washington - childhood home of Cobain.

Workman’s poetry is hauntingly and desolately beautiful, with creeping echoes of the master of American horror, Edgar Allan Poe. Workman matches the isolation of young Cobain with the bereavement and anger of the generation of lost souls he left behind. This elegiac piece moves from powerfully evocative scene-scaping to angry dialogue between the poet and her hero in an attempt to understand what drives people to take their own lives.

Like many myths and legends, Aberdeen proves that fate is immutable, and the show is shadowed with the dreadful inevitability of Cobain’s demise, the ‘patron saint of suicide’, whose life and legacy have been indelibly marked by his death. Workman poses questions around the responsibility of artists towards their fans, the painful irony of inspiring figures and voices of their generation losing their own voice and will to live.

Workman’s verse is dense, intense and unrelenting. If you don’t know anything about Kurt Cobain, that won’t stop you appreciating this heartbreaking tribute to a broken hero.

Engaging, beautiful and poignant – a staggering hour of spoken word.

**** Four stars

Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett

Cassie Workman: Aberdeen plays at London’s Soho Theatre until 16 December, with further information here.