Theatre is a ghosted experience, reinventing the past in the present act of performance, and making visible what is invisible, as an actor stands in for an absent person and tells their story. Dickie Beau’s new ensemble performance takes its title from Roland Barthes’s final essay in which the French cultural theorist considered photography, and the image as a memorial, through the lens of the grief he felt at his mother’s death.
In Beau’s piece the dead, William Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Terence McKenna and others, speak from beyond the grave as the performers lip-synch to found recordings previously used to disturbing effect by Beau in solo shows including Blackouts. As with any ghostly encounter, there’s a feeling that the conjuring of death in life is as much sensed or felt as it is seen. The atmosphere is a cross between a Victorian seance and a 1950s American funeral parlour. A piano plays on its own, there is a crackly recording of Houdini’s wife, Bess, at the 1936 seance when she accepts that her dead husband will never make contact.
But this is no Halloween chiller. Beau’s piece suggests that we are surrounded by ghosts, that haunting and being haunted is part of everyday life, particularly in an age where the image is everywhere and the detritus of online lives is a constant reminder of absence, our own and other people’s. Like several previous Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award-winning shows, this sometimes feels like a piece that hasn’t quite made the leap from brilliant idea to fully fledged performance. It’s sometimes tricky to hear, and it’s all head and very little heart. But while there were times during the performance when I felt like giving up the ghost, I’ve been haunted by it since: looking at my own family photographs with a different eye.
• Until 8 November. Box office: 0845 120 7511. Venue: The Pit, Barbican, London
