SPRINT FESTIVAL 2015
Glory Days is the brain child of Catherine Hoffmann, a collection of interviews with 140 members of the public talking about love and loss. In a one-woman show or a live art operetta, as she prefers to call it, Hoffmann narrates, sings, tap dances and draws these stories with confidence and ease.
Her setting simple; red ribbons hanging from the ceiling and an ironing board covered with pieces of paper, her sound system and other bits and pieces.
She tells us the story of Osiris and Isis tearing a piece of paper at the same time. And as Isis travels the earth to gather the scattered pieces of Osiris, so are members of the audience tasked to draw the faces of past lost loves on the torn pieces of paper, in the meantime Hoffmann hangs the faces of her heroes from the ribbons. And so we continue our journey to love, loss and human eccentricity.
Glory Days echoes the thoughts of people from all walks of life, genders and geographies, in an event closer to performance art than theatre. We are presented with the quirkiness of the human thought process, in all its glory.
And yet I left the venue feeling tired and annoyed and well aware that I was in the minority. The deal breaker for me was the constant repetition of sounds, syllables and words accompanied with repetitive electronic music. I found it overwhelming and distracting. Instead of breaking the possible monotony of a monologue, it detracted from the eloquence of the text and made me wish for a blackout. In this case less would have definitely been more!