I, Myself and Me

Review by: Paul Towers, 08 May 2016

I, Myself & Me by Rachael Young

Curve 6 – 8^th May 2016

“right on trendy hipster theatre”

Any one who has taken the organised tour round Leicester’s modern Curve theatre will know that the building is riddled with immensely versatile spaces that are used for rehearsals, meetings, conferences and, especially throughout the Inside Out Festival, intimate performances.

As resident associate director at Curve pointed out in his introduction to this production, this is a work in progress and this was only it’s third performance in front of a paying audience.

I have nothing but admiration for anyone who can write and perform an hour of material on their own on a stage. Rachael Young is an experienced writer/performer who was recognised as a ‘Breakthrough Artiste’ by Curve in 2013.

I, Myself and Me is as series of expressive structured prose pieces exploring and explaining her development from a child to an adult. While these descriptive segments work well to illustrate the angst we all go through growing up, they are linked (?!) with increasingly bizarre bits of business which seem to have no connection with the rest of the piece. For instance, she spends a fair amount of time in the last third of the performance ‘planting’ a garden with flowers.

She seems to revel in including the audience in her work and I was very uncomfortable when she came and sat next to me at the start of the show and asked me the time.

I am sure that the right on trendy hipster theatre goers will lap this style of writing and performance up but I am afraid it left me quite confused as to what I was expected to take away from the event.

I, Myself & Me is on tour. Full details can be found on www.rachaelyoung.net