REVIEW: MY DEAD by Carolyn Hartvigsen at Barons Court Theatre 3-4 March 2023

‘Hartvigsen is a wonderful storyteller’ ★★★ ½

“Do you know your dead?”

This is not an error in spelling or a missing contraction. It is, rather, the poignant question posed by Carolyn Hartvigsen in her solo show aptly and unambiguously called “My Dead”. Hartvigsen knows hers very well. Surprisingly so.

My Dead is a very personal project: it started as a drama school (Lamda) project during Covid times that Hartvigsen expanded into an hour-long show for the stage. She shows images of individuals and tells stories of her ‘dead’ while quoting their own words from letters they wrote. The (very) simple set was a small tree (actual, not family tree) with pictures clipped to it and removable as needed. To make this easily visible to the audience, there were projections of the photos with name and date on the wall behind her.

Hartvigsen regaled us, often while putting on amusing accents, with polygamy in her family history and about one matriarch with 12 children whose husband passed in the most unusual way. Speaking of a time when immigration wasn’t such a bad word in the societal zeitgeist, she spoke of family members moving to the US from Wales and Norway, and even heading to Mexico. The women in her lineage are especially strong and intrepid and resilient. No wonder she is proud of them.

While our raconteur dips her paintbrush onto the canvas and paints a picture of her dead ancestors, very compellingly, for a moment, she just as quickly removes it and brings it back to herself, with snippets that could range from poetic description of transition from place and time or opening the veil of her process or as (at one point, self-proclaimed) filler. It left me hungry for more of the time travel into a history that she gave a brief sample. Perhaps with some added embellishments, we could have been more fully transported into the lives of the past. Perhaps she felt she had to be true to the few primary source documents she held in her possession.

Her own story of falling in love and grieving the breakup with her ‘Frenchman’, who was mourning his own 'dead' (the wife and mother of his children), as she passed less than a year prior was added into the mix and connected to the theme, loosely. Hartvigsen is a wonderful storyteller who includes (thoughtfully designed) streams of consciousness. Though it felt more conversational and cathartic at times than a play, I, for one, am glad to have been conscious to hear these vivid tales of the past.

MY DEAD

Written and performed by Carolyn Hartvigsen

Creative Producer: Candice MacAllister

Lighting and Technical: Meg Le Marchant

Technician: Xinxi Du

Produced by Hart Productions

Twitter: @C_Hartvigsen

Reviewed by Mariam Mathew