"Bucket List ". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Sam Wagman

In 1998, two animated films concerning anthropomorphic insects were released: A Bug’s Life and (the far superior) Antz. Stemming from a very public feud between DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg and Pixar’s Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, the bizarre clash in release dates has long (and incorrectly) endured as a by-word for when artists, with no communication, produce similar work. It’s a fun piece of film lore and I promise there’s a link to this week’s production at the Burton Taylor Studio.

This week saw the wide-release of Andrew Haigh’s masterful new film, All of Us Strangers, in which Andrew Scott spends an extraordinary amount of time interacting with the ghosts of his dead parents whilst simultaneously delving deep into ideas of love, memory, and nostalgia. Haigh’s new film is an absolute masterclass in sensitive and tactful writing; its fantastical premise falling second only to its reckoning with the horrors of grief, loneliness, and the desire to gain purchase on anything.

Bucket List, the debut play from Show Don’t Tell Productions, is at its core, also a modern ghost story. Jess (Marianne Nossair) and Luke (Theo Joly) are two, vaguely in-love, twenty-somethings who enjoy picnics, bickering, planning their futures, and pontificating on the nature of life. It’s a quintessential piece of Oxford student drama with one tiny added proviso: in our first introduction to the couple, Luke nervously announces that he’s dead.

Two pieces of work, both dealing with grief, love, and memory in the context of a modernized ghost tale? Maybe there’s less ladybirds and more lamentations, but the parallel still stands.

I have spent the past couple weeks since first watching All of Us Strangers intermittently crying whilst playing Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love on repeat. Imogen Usherwood’s Bucket List has thankfully not elicited the same (slightly pathetic) response; a manifestly different story albeit with some brilliant parallels to Haigh’s work, I’m inclined to name Bucket List this week’s Antz. Both All of Us Strangers and Bucket List are directly in conversation with the intricacies of grief, the difficulties of familiarizing melancholy into our everyday over time, and the gaps through which the imaginary etches out caverns in our psyche. However, to Usherwood’s credit, whilst operating off a similar baseline to Andrew Haigh’s work, she has created a play just as formally experimental and emotionally affecting.

Usherwood never once tries to be too clever or too navel-gazing and yet, Bucket List represents one of the most exceptional explorations of grief I’ve seen put to the Oxford stage. Unwinding slowly over its short 50-minute run-time, the production comprises of glimmering vignettes into our protagonists’ relationship played concomitantly against the disconcerting presence of Luke’s ghost in Jess’s life. The trope of an annoying dead lover hovering incessantly over the living partner is nothing new: Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and  Death springs to mind or, for you fellow medical soap opera fanatics, Denny Duquette and Izzie Stevens in Grey’s Anatomy. However, there’s a reason behind this particular narrative’s longevity when it comes to investigating grief; it cuts to the very core of the bereaved desire to have that final conversation, final dance, and final goodbye. Death is often dubbed ‘the great equalizer’ but it’s also the great finalizer, and Bucket List grants its audience the privilege of spending time with Jess and Luke as they negotiate their elongated parting.

The direction of this play is nothing short of outstanding. Imogen Usherwood and Harry Ledgerwood’s decision to splice their vignettes with hilarious (and oft touching) snippets of songs, film audio, and advertisements is a stroke of genius (with credit to Ashling A. Sugrue’s sound design). I am almost inclined to a second outing just to jot down how many pop culture references are squeezed into those 5-second snapshots – I clocked Britney Spears’ Toxic, a little bit of Elvis, some Dead Poets Society, and Julia Roberts’ gutting speech in Notting Hill. These streaks of audio don’t just function to alleviate the harsher elements of the production but rather operate as an extension of Jess’s cognition of bereavement – Usherwood and Ledgerwood have conjured up a play that gives visuality and voice to the flashing nature of grief. You are compelled to sit and partake in Jess’s processing of shock, her nostalgia for a near-past that feels so abruptly alien, and the sparks of anger that all too often accompany mourning. So too, the non-linear episodic structure of the play gave voice to the feeling that audience and Jess were engaged in a fleeting symbiosis; the production functioning as both an opportunity for twisted grief voyeurism and active participation in the firing electrical impulses lighting up Jess’s brain. Bucket List is a testament to the power of confident and self-assured writing – Imogen Usherwood, you have captured my heart.

“I feel like a weird grief pervert”, Luke notes after witnessing so much of the aftermath of his death. It’s an invitation to introspect on the feeling of fascination we hold towards grief – is it because it’s untouchable before we’re handed it? Unfathomable until encompassing? Compelling before so totally catastrophic? I have no great eureka moment to share but Theo Joly and Marianne Nossair imbued their characterizations of Luke and Jess with so many of these questions and such a latent uncertainty towards them. It felt impossible to step out of the Burton Taylor without retaining a piece of Bucket List’s central couple, as if returning from a fantastical trip to the moon with only an unremarkable handful of dust. Fitting, given Usherwood’s perspective on grief as something ultimately unrepresentable; Nossair and Joly’s performances only prompt us to imagine the boundaries of our own real or potential grief, like a cropped image of atrocity. Their unique quirks and irritations felt familiar and yet purposefully distant, as if we, as audience, were interloping on a moment of profound personal connection. This is my first time seeing Joly and Nossair on stage but I sorely hope it’s not the last – the electricity and tenacity of their performances are nothing short of remarkable and a triumph of both their talent and the strength of writing on offer at Show Don’t Tell Productions.

I could wax lyrical about Bucket List for another 2,000 words but it’s a production that should be experienced live. I’m not one to ‘recommend’ plays, but if I could beseech you to see one this week, make it Bucket List. It’s not the most bombastic or ambitious production you’ll attend, but it’s perfect in its acceptance of that state. Exceptional in its mundanity and truly affecting in its closeness.