Edinburgh Fringe 2024
A History of Paper
Dundee Rep Theatre and Traverse Theatre
Genre: Musical Stories, New Writing
Venue: The Traverse
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
You could summarise this show as “A man empties bits of paper from a box”. And while this show does just that, it does so much more: from these bits of paper emerge two characters and their joyous love story. A History of Paper is a magical play with songs that explores love and grief and breaks your heart into a thousand tiny pieces.
Review
An origami rose
A menu from Pizza Express
Used plane tickets
Letters
Lots of pieces of paper gathering dust in a box, the kind of pieces of paper that tell a story of a life, of a love story and ultimately of grief, but remain merely cold dead artefacts until they’re fleshed out by their owners to tell their story…
When a man getting over a break up with his girlfriend by getting drunk and playing Radiohead on repeat gets a note through the door saying “Please could you shut the fuck up? Your music is doing my head in” it may not seem the most auspicious of starts to a relationship. But when his neighbour turns up the next day to apologise it becomes the start of something beautiful.
From mundane beginnings, the two unnamed characters (designated only as He and She in the text) weave a love story that is simultaneously uniquely their own and speaks to a more universal experience. Christopher Jordan-Marshall is the lovelorn bookseller with Emma Mullen as his journalist neighbour. Their words and songs intertwine and repeat each other, along with third person narration from them both, creating a picture of two people deeply and happily in love. Which makes the disruption when it comes even more devastating.
“What use is paper? To speak. To imagine. To remember”
When unspeakable tragedy occurs, Jordan-Marshall’s character loses his words, and in the end it is the paper trail that anchors him and leads him back to life. Emanuel uses the paper device to frame the play with interludes around Hemingway’s suitcase and George Wylie’s paper boat that sailed valiantly down the Clyde in 1989. Paper, that most fragile and transient of objects displays a resilience that underpins our lives with its history of ideas, of memories and of connections.
Andrew Panton’s taut direction ensures a unity and cohesion to the show which brings out the best from its two actors. Christopher Jordan-Marshall and Emma Mullen’s performances create a joie de vivre that will lift your spirits only to dash your heart into a thousand tiny pieces. This is a joint production from Dundee Rep Theatre and the Traverse. Originally a radio play for Radio 4, it was adapted as a play with songs by Emanuel and Webster. It is a fabulous piece of new writing lending a lightness and sense of space to the heaviness of its subject.
It feels ironic that Oliver Emanuel’s untimely death last year of a brain tumour robbed him of his words. This wonderful production of ‘A History of Paper’ restores and celebrates his words leaving them dancing round our minds like a scintillating shower of confetti.
A History of Paper is about loss, about grief. But above all it’s about love because without that love grief wouldn’t exist, and Emmanuel and Webster’s beautiful play manages to convince us that in the end love is always worth it.
