Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Deluge
Andrea Maciel & Gabriela Flarys
Genre: Performance Art, Physical Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A beguiling theatrical piece of magical realism about the things we lose and how we grieve them. In a winning performance, Gabriela Flarys blends true stories with fiction, movement, text, comedy and live music. Based on interviews with people wondering: “Who am I in the wake of a loss?”
Review
In his book A Grief Observed, beloved author C.S. Lewis reveals what he learned in the wake of his wife’s tragic death from cancer at age 45: “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out not to be a state but a process.” In Deluge, imaginatively created by Andrea Maciel (director) and Gabriela Flarys (performer), the show is the process.
After a painful break-up, Flarys finds herself alone in the house she’d moved into with her former lover, a house now full of ever enlarging holes and leaks that cannot contain the waters rising around her. Grief inevitably floods in, and Flarys does all she can to keep it at bay, an absurd and futile quest recognizable to anyone who’s attempted to do the same in the throes of anguish. When spoken words will not do, she sings. (Or screams. The show pointedly begins with a caterwauling howl.) When vocalizations are insufficient, she twists and turns to escape the maze of sadness she never wanted to enter.
Though this is a solo show, Flarys does more than recount her own efforts to crawl out of the depressed muck from a love gone astray. (Far astray: all the way to Australia, where the other half of her relationship has gone to make jam; this map of sorrow covers a whole lotta miles.) Unsure what to do in her own state of sadness, she turns to friends for advice.
And it is the recounting of these specific stories from her friends — the death of a loved one, the loss of an object — when Deluge is strongest. One anecdote — the details of the time a friend lost all of her pets in one horrifying incident — hits particularly hard, so much so that a great deal of the show that follows often feels like slightly weakened tea in comparison.
But grief is never a competition, and that tea is tasty nonetheless because the jam-splattered Flarys is such excellent company. Irresistibly charming and hilarious, she sings, she dances and she becomes one with a stepladder. (Rarely, if ever, has a stepladder become such a valuable onstage co-star.) She contorts herself every which way, a beautiful and ultimately touching physical representation of what her emotions would do if they were able bodied. Like Gloria Gaynor, Flarys will survive, her humanity and humor fully intact.
