Learning experience or unmitigated disaster?

I'm taking suggestions from the audience

Grief can do strange things to a person. It can make you lose sleep, work, hope and all sense of self.

And, of course, grief can sometimes cause you to sit in the crowded auditorium of your local theatre while the performers improvise a Dungeons and Dragons-themed musical in the style of Eurovision, as tears pour down your cheeks and soak your snug-fitting FFP3 respirator.

We’ve all been there.

But, you may be wondering, what specifically brought me to that point a week and a bit ago?

Well.

Back in March, I went to watch a play for the first time since the pandemic began. Having researched my nearest theatre’s upgraded fresh air ventilation system and been reassured by stories of other Covid cautious people who’ve avoided illness after attending shows, I saw A Streetcar Named Desire.

It was BRILLIANT, staged in a sensitive and inventive way with a Blanche DuBois to die for.

It was sad and melodramatic, of course. It was bittersweet that my mum wasn’t with me, especially as I saw many mother-daughter duos (and one grandmother-mother-daughter trio that I considered overkill).

I also felt creatively inspired and artistically fulfilled, or the other way round. And I remained dry-eyed for the duration — apart from when we leapt up into a standing ovation.

I wanted to go again, but I thought it might make more sense to see a lighthearted little musical to ensure I didn’t tear up at all. That was my first mistake.

My second was assuming that an outing I’d effortlessly made on a Saturday afternoon would affect me similarly on a Friday evening, the night my mum and I traditionally watched a film together. The night people go out with their friends, parents and partners. The night I find it hardest to live through every week.

On top of that, regrettably, I think… I may not like improv? I’m sorry. I used to love Whose Line is it Anyway? as a kid.

Maybe I grew out of it or maybe I’m extra impatient right now but I started to wonder if this kind of production is slightly more fun for the performers than the audience. I got the sense that they’d probably have still been doing it if none of us had turned up: sniggering at their in-jokes, challenging each other to portray two characters at once, going off on melodic yet irrelevant tangents.

It’s also entirely possible that I’m too uptight, bitchy and judgemental to let myself go. In the first few minutes of any play, I have to acclimatise to being over-enunciated at and let my inner cringe settle.

With improv, it’s worse, because all the wannabe actors in the audience are desperate to share their suggestions, wasting their fifteen seconds of fame yelling out nonsense like “that musical H from Steps was in” whereas they should be shrieking, “Sondheim!”

Mostly, though, “I left in tears before the interval” isn’t the terrible review it sounds like. This was about me, not them.

I’ve always found it difficult to be around crowds of enthusiastic people. I was raised in Yorkshire, where “Don’t show yourself up” isn’t so much a maxim as a rule of law. (My grandma once told me I was nothing special and she meant it as a compliment.)

The problem isn’t purely my cynical aversion to extroverts and the well-adjusted, though.

When I’m low, being around people who are (or seem to be) enjoying themselves sucks what’s left of my serotonin stores dry. That’s one reason I’m inclined to isolate: my mood is less prone to negative fluctuations that way. It’s also less prone to positive ones. Fun!

I’m difficult to please at the moment: I want to be distracted from my grief but not irritated by banality and anyone with two alive parents better not talk about them often or they’re on THIN ICE.

Sometimes, I don’t know I’ll hate something until it’s underway and it’s a lot easier to exit Netflix or delete a podcast from your phone than back out of a Dungeons and Dragons-themed musical in the style of Eurovision.

If my mum was still alive, I probably would have enjoyed it. As things stand, I’d vastly overestimated myself.

I assumed I’d be further along in my “journey” and that the lighter evenings might make going out after 6 PM appealing. I fell for the old linearity myth, the idea that grief improves over time and then you’re healed. Ha.

And I didn’t think about the fact that I haven’t gone out on my own at night… I was going to write “in years” but I actually don’t think I’ve done that ever.

A series of factors converged to make this such a disastrous first attempt.

I was overtired. I’d spent the last week and a bit in feral mode, powered by caffeine, adrenaline and irregular meals, rushing to rewrite an incredibly draining personal essay ahead of my first PhD appraisal.

I was struggling to sleep, which made me more exhausted and emotionally raw, adding to my anxiety about the appraisal, my in/ability to write a book and how the hell I’m going to earn any money once my funding runs out.

I had a horrible week hormonally too, with PMDD running me ragged and the added bonus of daily hot flushes. I’d spent large swathes of time wandering the flat in my dressing gown, clutching my stomach and weeping, triggered by everything I saw or heard or thought, no matter how generic. (“Carpet! My mum used to walk on carpets!”)

Added to that, I can already feel the anniversary of my mum’s death next month like a gravitational pull, a black hole ready to suck me up. On the morning of the theatre trip, I saw a reminder that a year previously, she’d received a particularly brutal letter from the hospital.

In retrospect, it’s a miracle I didn’t lie face down on the carpet, screaming into the underlay.

I seemed to think “the show must go on” applied to me too. Plus “don’t waste money” is another Yorkshire rule of law — it’s one thing to overspend but to pay for tickets and not use them? Criminal.

I started to cry in the taxi there. Somehow, I assumed I could muscle through the rest of the night. I assumed I had to.

Then I sat in the auditorium, surrounded by strangers with their friends, parents and partners.

As the improvising began and people screamed with laughter and kicked the back of my seat in excitement, I was hit by the same thought loop that had been torturing me all week, when I wasn’t pressing play on a podcast or frantically revising another underwritten paragraph: I want my mum/I wish I was dead/I want my mum/I wish I was dead/I want my mum/I wish I was dead.

Tears sprung to my eyes and wouldn’t stop. I pictured myself getting up, walking out, booking a taxi, unlocking my front door and collapsing onto the sofa. I tuned out the on-stage babbling and heard my inner voice shout, “Leave! JUST DO IT, LEAVE!”

I levitated out of my seat, thinking, is this what I’m doing, I can’t really be doing this, reassuring the lovely staff member who tried to offer me water that no, I wasn’t going to feel better in a couple of minutes.

When the taxi came, it was practically a minibus. I knew I’d struggle to open the back door so I asked the driver to sit next to him instead. I then shook with sobs the whole way home as he politely pretended I didn’t exist.

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more desolate, more certain that life has no hope or purpose. I’ve been recovering since, trying to accept how awful it was. To make sense of why it hit me so hard.

At one of my grief support groups last week, someone talked about going to an event for a few minutes, like a taster, only aiming for that marginal success. Not a whole performance. Not an attempt to erase their reality.

If I’d attempted to be dry-eyed in a theatre for five minutes, I could have called my outing a triumph. I would have been far better off making that kind of low-stakes plan than playing it by ear.

Despite what Amy Poehler claims, real life isn’t improv. It’s much more insufferable.

Sometimes you can’t face being on stage or even in your seat. You have to hide behind the safety curtain. You need to wait in the wings.