Every Single Thing In My Whole Entire Life

Worried about memory lapses – triggered significantly when she could not remember the word ‘Alzheimer’s’ – Zoë Coombs Marr decided to track her entire life.  That is, from ‘Before Me’ all the way though to ‘After Me’.  She kicked off with a Miro board (knowing acknowledgement and chuckles from the audience) and used the Rudolph Steiner system of seven-year periods for the stages of her life.  Colour coded.  This chart is projected on a big video screen.  (Unfortunately, anyone more than ten rows back can’t read it, but anyway…)

Using a hand mike and dressed in a Xena Warrior Princess T-shirt, Coombs Marr prowls around the stage, talking very fast, a figure of frenetic, buzzing energy, adding footnotes and by-the-ways to her stories, undercutting herself with throwaways and laughs.

A disturbing discovery was that Coombs Marr could remember details but nothing else of the most supposedly important days in her life.  E.g. first day at school, there was a frog in the toilet…  Anything else?  Gone.

Switching to a spread sheet (more knowing acknowledgement and groans from the audience) so as to include more data, cross-referencing, and names changed and unchanged, Coombs Marr shows us her life in minute and, as she admits, excessive detail.  She reveals that her memory throws up scenes of possible embarrassment or even humiliation – but views such things as problems that she is proud to have solved.  E.g. getting out of an awkward encounter by pretending to be her own twin. 

As the show and her life roll on, Coombs Marr checks her wristwatch and, knowing all along that her whole entire life cannot be presented, she invites the audience to pick a subject or a category of experience off the spread sheet.  And then, with impressive, quick-thinking facility, she talks to that.  More anecdotes tumble out, faster and faster.

Apart from addressing the quite serious question of memory – that is, just why do we remember what we do remember – this show gives us a less cerebral Coombs Marr than in her previous shows.  Here, despite the Miro board and the spreadsheet, the priority is to reveal even more of herself and the absurdities of her life.  It is all a bit hit and miss – the show really is a cheerful shambles – but the audience has a great time.  They just like this performer, and the laughs keep coming.

Michael Brindley