In the months that followed, trauma took over. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I eventually lost my job, spending my days trying to understand how to keep existing in a world that suddenly felt completely unrecognisable. The hardest part, I didn’t have the words to describe how I was feeling. Grief had stripped me of language. As the founder and Artistic Director of Tailwind Physical Theatre, when words fail, I turn to movement. So, I started making.
Our new show, Griefcase, was born entirely from that wordless, heavy space. Devised by myself and the incredible ensemble of Tailwind Physical Theatre, the piece follows G, who returns to his childhood flat to clear it out before the council repossesses it. Surrounded by the physical clutter of a life—all the things you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away, he navigates the empty rooms, and memories of his late mother surface. Her presence follows him, showing him fragments of their shared past and forcing him to confront a deeply complicated relationship.
G has always viewed his mother through the lens of what she got wrong—the ways he felt she failed him and what she could have done differently. But as he relives their history, those judgements begin to crack. The ultimate guilt of realising he may never have understood his mother as a whole, flawed person becomes a heavy part of his grieving process.
But Griefcase isn’t just a sombre meditation on death. Crucially, it is a story about being queer. It is about the friction of becoming your authentic self while simultaneously carrying the people, places, and heavy expectations that came before you. It is also deeply rooted in growing up working-class, exploring how the things left behind by those we lose aren’t always valuable in a conventional sense, but can be entirely priceless to the person holding them. As a movement artist, I am fascinated by what the body remembers when the mind is trying to forget. We show the visceral, physical reality of loss: how it twists and distorts everyday movements, how it sits in the pit of your stomach, how it alters the way you walk through a room, and how it eventually works its way up and out of your mouth.
We aren’t interested in making grief pretty. It isn’t a straight line, and it certainly isn’t polite. Grief can be ridiculous. It can be funny, angry, embarrassing, messy, and completely physical. Griedcase is our invitation to sit together, laugh at the things that probably aren’t funny, and make space for what we aren’t ready to let go of yet.
Come and share your own stories with us after the lights go down. We would absolutely love to see and talk to as many people as possible, and we’d love for the conversation not to end when the lights go down. Come and see the show, stay afterwards, tell us what you thought, tell us your own stories, or just sit with us for a while.
By Ru Lawrence, Artistic Director, Tailwind Physical Theatre.
Griefcase runs from 22nd September to 3rd October, at The Hope Theatre, 207 Upper Street, London N1 1RL, United Kingdom.
