Therapy

I've become very used to people asking me if performing Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister is cathartic; I've found lots of different ways of saying no, it's not. There is... something in having made a show out of the thing which has all but destroyed me, but cathartic it ain't. It's an acting job. If I were to use it as catharsis... well, ask anyone who shared a late-night tube with me in 2005 - they'll tell you how much fun it is to actually experience the actual emotions of my actual sister's actual murder shaking me and wringing my neck.

Today, though, was the first time that an audient used the term therapy to refer to their experience of the show. I thought I'd peaked at the point where one woman approached me after the show and thanked me for, well, she said for helping her get through some of her grief for her father. She felt that the show said some things that she had needed to hear since her father died 50 years ago.

I am recording this here, now, because I failed to tell her at the time the effect it had on me to hear this. Since I was about ten, I guess, I've felt inadequate because I just can't get over Dad's death. To hear this woman's experience, well, my heart went out to her. I'm like everyone else: I want to think that others get over their grieving as well. On top of that I felt just a little bit less alone and freakish. I wish I'd told her, but I was so surprised by her feelings and her candour that I didn't think as quickly as I'd like. Thank you woman who came to the show today and then spoke to me about her Dad's death. Thank you.

Yet there was more. A man, a bit older than me I guess, took my hand. Not in a romantic way - it was pretty rainy and grey in the Burgh today, and it's pretty gravelly and muddy outside the Hut where the show happens. He took my hand and told me that I really remind him of his sister. He said he used to be an aid worker and that when he stopped doing that work his sister told him that whenever he had been away she had worried a great deal about his safety. He accepted Martin and my invitation to have a post-show coffee/shandy. We talked a great deal about the pressures on aid workers, about the show, about the moments which really spoke to him. We talked about death and politics and the media and then he went off to see some comedy. Before he did so, though, he said that the show, for him, was therapeutic.

Martin and I sat, rather stunned. We're both tired, we find it hard to do all the moving around that's necessary at the Fringe, particularly Martin and his amazing blisters (that's our next show). Yet I think it was more the effect of these people and their stories, that we have managed to create something which matters to other people, not just to us.

For me, at least, it was time for a good afternoon lie down.