Review: MICHAEL ROSEN: GETTING THROUGH IT, Cambridge Corn Exchange - Tour
Photo credit: Billie Charity
It’s a remarkably simple premise for an evening at the theatre. A man in his seventies walks onto the stage in sweater and jeans, greets the audience and then reads two of his published works – both of which the vast majority of the audience have already read. What results is something quite remarkable – a coming together of audience and performer in a sharing of grief, trauma and the experience of, as the evening is titled, Getting Through It.
There is anticipation in the bar as audience members look at the books on display. Michael Rosen has always been a part of so many of our lives. Many of the audience grew up with Rosen’s work and have shared it with their children, grandchildren or in the case of teachers, their pupils. During the evening, a casual aside mentioning We’re Going on a Bear Hunt led to a cheer and a kind of communal sigh of recognition, unlike anything usually heard in a theatre.
This evening, however, it’s not his work for children he will be reading; for in recent years, he has become something of a national voice for ways of coping with grief and sadness. The performance consists of two monologues. In The Death of Eddie, he talks about the sudden death of his teenage son; and in Many Kinds of Love, he recalls his experience of COVID and the care he received.
When his 19 year old son Eddie died of meningitis in 1999, Rosen did what he does best: he wrote about it. And it is that account of a terrible event and the aftermath that he reads to us during the first part of the evening. For 40 minutes, we listen in hushed silence, occasionally smiling at his asides, but mostly sharing his grief and silently relating his story to events in our own lives.
Many of the audience will be familiar with this piece of writing, but hearing him read it and retell the story, live, to us, makes it both more powerful and more affecting. He has an easy command of the large auditorium, even from a seated position, and the occasional glance or aside adds to the immediacy of the rehearsed reading.
It is a remarkable performance, particularly in view of all that he has gone through more recently during the pandemic, and it is COVID that sets the scene for the second half of the evening.
Remarkably, this simple reading of the powerful text Rosen wrote about his experience in the ICU when he had COVID, leaving him in a coma for more than forty days, takes the audience on an even more heartfelt journey that is appropriately cathartic. As the desperate story unfolds, the inevitable dark humour of the hospital situation is occasionally enhanced by minimal asides to the audience, but for the most part ,it’s the story of his remarkable recovery that we get. For much of the time, the words are those of his nurses, therapists and family, writing in the diary they kept for him since he has no memory of that period. There are jokes, of course, and they serve their purpose to relieve the built-up tension, but for the most part we just live the story with him, as many of us did following his progress in real time on social media when he was between life and death in a coma in the Intensive Care Unit for 48 days.
Audience involvement is total, hanging on every word, and, we suspect, in many cases reliving their own experiences of the pandemic and perhaps of someone who didn’t make it through. At the end of his reading, Rosen thanked the audience and quietly left the stage to rapturous applause. He was already heading to the bar for a book signing when he was called back again to acknowledge the applause once more.
Getting Through It is presented in partnership with Child Bereavement UK and is touring until November. Catch it if you can – deceptively simple yet powerfully affecting, it is a remarkable event for an audience to share.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Chris Abbott