Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) by Nassim Soleimanpour, Royal Court Theatre, 19 July 2024

To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.

We fancied this, as we had seen one of Nassim’s previous works, the eponymous one…

…and loved it.

This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.

That’s exactly what it was.

When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.

This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:

It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this piece, including a list of other performers involved.

It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.

We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.