The cliché is that if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there. That is my eighties. Arriving in 1980 as a 15-year-old with conviction that I would one day make it to Hollywood and I left it with a battered Conservative Party membership card, an abhorrence of hair metal as the antithesis of my beloved NWOBHM and drunk. In most parts, my experience of the decade was about as far removed from Ben Harrison’s as you could imagine. And yet it was remarkably similar.
If you expect that Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is a hymn to that time, then you can expect it comes not as a sonnet nor a villanelle but free verse. Each episode tumbles out of the focus of the last without reference or a narrative connection to it—and that is its strength. Much like the teenage years it is describing, this drives itself by being a series of ideas that hang around whilst central characters are listening to the songs of the decade that made sense then. They are a reflection of that time and, in that mirror, we get a sense of how we have evolved, or how much of us remains the same. Still desperately hopeful that the object of our desire may just realise we have fleshed out from the skinny adolescent and deserve attention.
Added to that are the mirrors of song. Harrison’s collaborator, DPJ, has reimagined the classics of their combined youth in such a fashion that you first recognise the words if not the melody, then find yourself listening anew. You know the songs, have recognised the words but never before heard them with such meaning attached. Your entry point to that ideal of memory, sparking off not just the emotional recognition but the resonance of emotive memory, is quite startling. I found myself hearing standards as standards had always meant to be delivered: freshly.
And yes, this canon was not the anthem of my youth, but it never passed me by. Hearing it anew doomed nothing to fading memory, but it jumped at me with exceptional strength. This was, of course, partly due to the decision taken to include the cello. The beauty of a cello playing underneath songs which didn’t haunt but lifted, like a film score of which you become unaware until the effect of it has transformed scenes. Here, its beauty was as theatrical as it was melodic. Justyna Jablonska has a serious contribution made with such glorious intent.
The delivery of these stories, along with the hardest working performer onstage—Emery Hunter—interpreting the words of song and narrative into sign, whilst occasionally providing some of the female characters when needed, makes this physically sing with a lyricism that talks of now, looking back at then. The integration of sign is signalled form the beginning, as Hunter is onstage with DPJ first, performing first and we have the agenda on a Scottish stage set once more as an inclusive one.
It is fair to say that Harrison does at times stumble, but that makes for a more authentic experience. A purist may haughtily feel that this should not be the case for the Artistic Director of Grid Iron, but this is a significantly prescient piece of modern theatre which packs more in than your average 60-minute special. Hesitancy brings a degree of authenticity, and what we see and hear of THAT time rings true of OUR time. Whatever the trauma of the past can often decide how we approach our future—even 40 plus years on. That is the connection which allows us access to the thoughts and feelings relevant for progress.
And whilst we are on acting. DPJ. If there is a better scowl in the free western world, I would love to see it. In fact, I wouldn’t. Channelling what I can only presume is his experience of the collective and standard Presbyterian admonition of the average west of Scotland authoritarian figure, DPJ made the hairs on my arms rise every time he came on to give someone trouble—especially as yon Scottish jannie. It made his arrival as Mr. Polly quite the moment. It acted as the way into his own story that was joy and horror. The blend of the unacceptable jibe and the pain we collectively felt—some through shared experience, others, like me, through shame we knew but did nothing—was effective because of the set-up.
And so, director Scott Johnston has delivered what is a minor triumph: teenage years in a coherent whole. And this is where it works as such an effective piece of theatre. The ways in which Hunter brings in sign and then part of the way through, Harrison begins to sign back, hesitantly, and with trepidation until later, he signs with confidence. Knowing that drip feed would enlist us closer to acceptance is also about how the energy that Hunter brings allows everyone to live in the shadow and allow the words to deliver the stories and the songs to drift in the emotions. The effort comes between stage and seats—Johnston knows how to negotiate that, and masterfully delivers it.
The set, with its eighties neon and flashing, works well besides the reverb of the songs, the lack of props makes us feel we can engage in its simplicity and enjoy, but there is one star who never made it to the stage. They are not contained, referred to nor dedicated to in songs by The Smiths, Tears For Fears, Bronski Beat, The Cure or any others of fame and in-fighting.
Ben Harrison’s grandmother. Deciding to hand-glide at 65, doing so at 70 and the unofficial photographer for this very show where she seems to have captured the greatest actor in Europe in a more modest pose. There is little need to wonder where his weirdly shod feet have brought him, but if there is anything you can take from this when you leave, it is, ah the eighties, you didn’t actually have to be there. That’s all you need remember.