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Miranda Prag: An Attempt To Lose Time
An engaging show on a fundamental theme
To Colchester Arts Centre on another of their Wonderful Wednesdays, a chance to experience new and different work from all over where everyone’s on the guest list and you’re only asked to pay what you can afford.
The title of this show was enough to catch my interest, and the description had me booking a ticket right away. How much of our lives are ruled by the precision of the clock, and how hard would it be to shed its influence over us? And how did we get ourselves from a position where wasn’t everywhere and every place judged it based on its own place in the world to one where the Universal Time standard is always in our pockets or on our wrists?
Miranda Prag’s show doesn’t try to give us the complete answer to those questions, but sometimes just asking them is enough to get us looking at the world in a different way. I also do her a bit of a disservice by making the premise for this show sound quite dull when it’s really anything but. It’s inventive, engaging and also properly funny. An early moment in the show where she interacts with her own voiceover makes the tone clear and that — to paraphrase a fictional expert on time — she may be serious about what she does, but she’s not necessarily serious about the way that she does it.
The show’s well-written and well-performed, mixing voiceover with live performance (with very good integration of audio description and captioning to make it fully accessible) as Prag puts together a contraption on stage that links together many of the themes of her attempts to lose time, and the way events contrive to lose her in it as well. It connects to the global unrootedness and casting loose of the pandemic and me think about how much we’re defined by schedules and arbitrary rhythms, about how rare and how hard it is for us to awaken with the dawn and sleep with the sunset.
Whether intentional on hr part or not, I also found myself thinking about Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim becoming unstuck in time and the idea of time being linear as a purely human conceit not shared by the rest of the universe. Did he lose time, or was he trapped in the amber of it, unable to escape its clutches? And then back to my old question of whether the pandemic was the closest…
