A Preoccupation With Romantic Love
Laura Thurlow is a writer and performer originally from the Great Lakes Region of Canada with
experience performing across Europe. Her recent credits include being a finalist at the European Slam Final held by Commonword (Manchester), and at the Glasgow Women’s Library’s ‘Calm Slam’. She has recently been a featured performer in Edinburgh with both The Loud Poets and Spit It Out!
The show takes its title from a lecturer’s ten-year-old criticism of Laura’s writing portfolio – that it displayed ‘an unnecessary preoccupation with romantic love.’ In writing this show, she hopes to get it out of her system and shortly move on to writing on more serious matters and perhaps, having rid herself of her terrible desire to be loved, develop a lucrative career as an estate agent.
‘Preoccupation’ is an hour long show in six micro-acts – Laura addresses six ‘ghosts’ (her six exes) through the medium of the voicemails they left her to end things. The performance combines traditional stand-up elements with a theatrical staging and portions of poetic verse. In a timeline spanning ten years, she lays plain her romantic disappointments and makes light of the easier sorrows – the European aristocrat who left her behind to pursue a life as a mountaineer in the Yukon, the gregarious Medieval re-enactor who liked everything about her (except most of what she had to say), the three-month love bomber who vanished without a trace. Then there are the harder sorrows – the high school best friend who cut things off abruptly, the married guy who strung her along, the one whose anger did its best to whittle her into nothing – and quite nearly succeeded.
'Preoccupation' is on in Edinburgh from 5-11th August at 15:00, and returns from August 19-27th at 20:45.
While reading about the show, I'm not quite sure whether it counts a stand-up comedy or a spoken word show. And there were elements of theatricality in the production. Where do you see your work sitting, especially in the context of the fringe which is very dominated by comedy?
Yes, this is always a tough thing to discern when you're thinking about how to label a solo show. I've landed on thinking of it or branding it as a play, that's the intention. It's definitely not stand-up in any traditional sense - there are jokes, but a forward plot line driving the thing, a sense of theatricality, and it is scripted without much room for improvisation or any audience interaction.
So, suffice it to say - it's a comedy/drama theatre piece, a funny play about a sad topic. As to where it sits in the context of the Fringe - I've listed myself under theatre because that's where I think I belong! And then I've listed the subgenres as spoken-word (which is my background) and comedy (because I do intend for it to be funny!). But yeah, it feels more at home examined as theatre then as stand up - but I still hope people will laugh.
I also get the impression that your work is quite autobiographical. Within your working process, do you find it quite difficult to engage with your own past emotionally, or do you find something cathartic about exploring previous relationships in this way?
So, the emotional heart of the story is autobiographical. The facts, circumstances, named persons - the characterization of myself, are not autobiographically factual. That degree of separation I believe allows me to engage with it with a sense of clarity. It's heightened, it's camp - and it's honest, but honest in an emotional sense rather than being a literal rehashing of my life's story.
That, frankly, is something I think I might never be prepared to share in a performative context. That, too, is an in-text element of the story, I suppose, that I'm constantly simultaneously like "Look at me, but don't look at me." Being uncomfortable with the truth is a central tenet of the story I'm trying to tell - and so is having an anxious/avoidant attachment style. The construction of the piece surrounds six voicemails of people breaking up with me, and I've had people ask me "Wait, six people broke up with you over the phone?"
And it's like, yeah, kind of - has that not happened to everyone ? - and then the inevitable question is why I've decided to reconstruct these rather devastating phone calls and I can't pretend that's been easy. I've been working with some great actors on these recordings and then having to listen to them back feels like getting punched in the stomach every time - because even if the phone calls aren't real, there is a real memory they evoke. and hey - this is ultimately a story about letting go of shame and looking to the future, deciding that just because these awful things have happened to you doesn’t mean that you are caught in a pattern, or story that you have no power to change. You’ll always be the person it happened to, but you’ll be more than that, too.
I suppose it's inevitable question, why bring the show to the fringe?
I’m afraid I’m more of a why not person ! Living in Edinburgh for some years I have developed relationships here and see the Fringe, despite it being this tremendous behemoth of a festival, as friendly turf. Moreover, the opportunity exists for me to do so and I don’t have all that much to lose. This year, I’ve had this particular story to tell and I hope it will be at home in a festival that is known for its embrace of experimentation.
How far do you feel that production expresses a particular sensibility? Reading over your descriptions of your various ex partners, I get the impression that there is quite a lot of toxic masculinity floating around in their behaviour – perhaps all of them, but one or two seem as if they haven't quite got to grips with treating other people as human.
This is a show that is preoccupied by romance and kind of central to that is my character’s idealization of a kind of love that reads more like a desire for community (as she monologues about her dreams, she talks about how her ideal man would pick her up from her dental appointments and write her nice birthday cards ). So there’s an estrangement at the heart of this piece between love and sex - I think there’s a struggle with both but crucially a detachment from the body and a fixation on the storybook trappings of romance.
As to the question of toxic masculinity, that really does feel like such a big tent club. So, five of the six are men, and I’d have to say that probably most are influenced by some degree of toxic masculinity. In particular, a recurrent theme between these relationships are men who are most emotionally accessible and potent while they are drinking. And then, well, the opening monologue (delivered by Glasgow actor Toby Jeffries) is basically like a three minute treatise on all the ways he’s no longer attracted to me - but that he still needs the £20 I owe him to make rent.
So yeah, I think some of these men (and the real men who inspired them) have sincere and serious issues with masculine identity and fairly active disdain for the women they date. And it sort of gets worse and worse as the show goes on (but also more nuanced) till we get to the discussion of my character’s “original wound” - this unnamed incident from her teenage years that has shaped everything thereafter - the sort of boys she knew at school that set in place this divide between herself and her body. It’s kind of hard to get into it without just explaining everything that happens in the show!
But yeah, this is a show for people who have dated men and have felt the worse for having done so. I really struggle to suggest how to advertise it to anyone who hasn’t - I suppose in a way it’s come down to discussions I’ve had with the straight men in my life about this show who have been kind of shocked by it like, “there’s no way someone actually said that to you” and I’m like “yes, he did, and worse.” So if everything I’m saying sounds shocking, come to the show and examine that?
Do you have any other artists or theatre companies, film or TV shows that you feel a particular affinity with in terms of your work?
if I ever work out who exactly it is whose shtick I’m borrowing I’d love to credit them. But I really struggle to say what this show is “like”. I think I’ll understand better once I’ve done it thirty more times. I think on a baseline level, if you enjoy spoken word, this is the sort of show that will feel familiar. I think the poet Demi Anter (who is a friend - and featured as monologue 6) and I have a really similar dramatic sensibility when it comes to our writing. I’ve also recently seen “Orlando” at the Camden People’s Theatre, written and performed by Lucy Roslyn and I think I’m trying to do something a bit like that if a fair bit less masterfully.
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