Miranda Prag: An Attempt To Lose Time

An engaging show on a fundamental theme

Nick Barlow
3 min readApr 11, 2024
An Attempt To Lose Time

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.

--

--

Nick Barlow

Former academic and politician, now walking, cycling and working out what comes next. https://linktr.ee/nickbarlow