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Sitting somewhere between a concert, a theatre piece and an installation, Endings at Project Arts Centre is a powerful work that explores experiences of loss through the moment of death, as well as examining the spaces within memory in which those experiences and the people they relate to live on.

Using interviews recorded on tape and vinyl records, alongside the music of Paddy Mann and the voices of the live performers, this production weaves an intricate net of experiences that is insightful and affecting. The style of the interviews and the way they were written together by Tamara Saulwick creates a polyphony of interlocking and overlapping stories, reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich.  Saulwick takes a subject that many writers have tackled before but rather than taking it from the usual angle of exploring the sense of grief and loss after someone has died, Saulwick takes the stories of the moment someone dies, the moments at deathbeds where, as Emily Dickinson writes, “Breaths were gathering firm\For that last Onset.” She captures the moments on the cusp, the moment where the emotions that accompany loss are just beginning to flood in.

This is reflected in the intense flood of sensation that accompanies the stories. Alongside the enormity and intensity of Peter Knight’s sound design, Ben Cobham’s lighting design is the glue that holds the live performance and the recorded elements together. Using a frame of tracks, the performers bring the lights around the stage with them, focusing attention as they move. Moving between soft, swinging lights and high-octane, genuinely frightening strobe sequences, Cobham truly captures the variety and intensity of emotion in the text.

Endings captures the audience and draws them into a deeply personal, surprisingly immersive theatrical experience that is simultaneously exhilarating, exhausting, emotional and cathartic.

Endings was shown at the Project Arts Centre from October 12-14, 2017.