Browse reviews

Edinburgh Fringe 2009

All the Lonely People and Me

Claire Fleury

Venue: The Spaces at Royal College of Surgeons

Festival:


Low Down

Claire Fleury explores the last taboo that’s left now that it’s okay to say anything at all about sex and death. She says some interesting things but (unintentionally?) shows how hard it is to get to the heart of the matter.
 

Review

 All credit is due to someone prepared to stand up and talk for an hour about a subject that most of us think about a great deal but almost never speak about.

Claire Fleury begins by dramatising what she sees as the difficulty that we in her audience have in recognising that we are implicated in the topic. But though that is thought-provoking, it seems to me wrong-headed. Most of us are surely very aware of loneliness as an issue that affects us. We have been lonely in the past or fear that we might be lonely in the future. Or we are lonely now.

She then offers a series of vignettes of “lonely” people which are evocative and haunting but which fail to distinguish between the state of being alone and of being lonely. A man standing in the street holding a sign advertising a sandwich bar, whom she evokes for her audience, is certainly alone but is not necessarily lonely. You can, on the other hand, feel very lonely in the middle of a party of close friends celebrating your birthday.

And even leaving aside the blurring of the difference between loneliness and solitude, she does not discriminate between different kinds of loneliness. Being lonely in a strange town is not the same as being lonely inside a relationship.

Claire Fleury has a strong and even striking presence on stage and delivers the monologue with great intensity, but there is an odd contrast between the directness of her style and the evasiveness of what she is conveying about this most serious issue.
 
Even given her frustrating failure (refusal?) to go more deeply and bravely into the painful complexities of the subject, nobody could fail to find resonance in many of her observations.

Published

Show Website

clairefleury.com