Plenty of life in this witty look at death
Greeted at the door with hugs, and tea and sandwiches, Pauline Goldsmith certainly knows how to take care of her guests. It’s a pity the same can’t be said of her hosts at the Fringe, with surely one of the theatre spaces inside the Assembly rooms rather than a makeshift container outside, better suited to presenting the return of the Fringe hit that wowed audiences in 2002.
Still, she makes the best of it, at one stage ad-libbing that she better get the boiler fixed, as a bus noisily trundling by on George Street threatens to drown out her reverie about the dear deceased and the dying.
resurrected here as part of the Made In Scotland showcase, and as evocative and poignant now as it ever was, (though there’s rather a bit too much time wasted spent fussing over the purvey at the beginning), Bright Colours Only is a life-affirming show about death.
It is one in which the pro forma necessities and formalities about staging a home wake – embalming really is a must, but make sure not to overdo the make-up as you don’t want the corpse to look too healthy – are treated with comic spirit, and a gentle resignation that death comes us to all.
Having got the audience settled, and comfortable with the elephant in the room, (well, the coffin to be more precise), after a brief introduction to caretaking options, Goldsmith proceeds to lead us on a journey through the grieving process that is as pointed and moving as it is humorous.
this she does by dint of summoning up the spirits of the dead – her granny’s reminiscences of wanting to be an actress; the sudden death of her father from a heart attack – in touching pen portraits of their frailties, strengths and personalities, that vividly place their lives before us, every bit as much as their deaths. Interspersed with voiceover recording of childhood memories, and reactions to death and its meaning, the show is a slow burn that touches at our darkest fears about the end, but does so with a lightness of touch that takes a grave subject and places it in its proper place as an inevitable consequence of living.
As Samuel Beckett said: ‘We are all born straddling the grave.’ And what Bright Colours Only shows us is that recognition of that fact should spur us on to live as full a life as we can, while we can.