A Human Instinct

Too late do I realise the scheduling of my interview with Chris Larner was somewhat misguided. When we meet, I am shaken, emotionally drained – alongside the rest of the late-afternoon audience, all having just left Larner's latest show, An Instinct for Kindness, at the Pleasance Dome.

When Larner arrives, it looks like he too, is spent. He has just recounted a story of untold difficulty: of his journey with his ex-wife, Allyson, through their first interactions, their relationship, the developing, enveloping progression of her multiple sclerosis, and the eventual poison draft she consumed in Zurich at the "assisted dying" clinic, Dignitas. A one-man show with no set but a single chair, Larner slips easily from narrating her illness, to recreating dialogues, to the recital of poetry.

“There was somebody today, halfway back, just sobbing, and that's what got to me,” he tells me.

And it's true: as I watch the show, the lady beside me can do nothing but bury her head in her hands, and another seems close to wailing when the curtain call arrives. “People have been coming up to me after the show, in various levels of distress or discomfort, and they all have stories that they want to tell. The nexus of the show is about death. And stories about death, generally, are stories that we struggle to share: it's a huge responsibility, and not an easy one. It can be heartbreaking.”

Why then, I ask, would he decide to repeatedly relive these events? “The lighting designer of the show before mine, Time for the Good Looking Boy—an Israeli man—helped his mother to die ten years ago. He told me that it's taken him those ten years to get to a point where he could even conceive of writing anything about it. The realisation that this ought to be brought to the stage came to me, in fact, on the morning that Allyson died. I was drinking an espresso in the hotel, alone; at that point, I thought, 'I need to write a play about this'. This thought was quickly followed by a sense of self-revulsion: 'what the fuck? How could you possibly consider painting this with artifice when it's somebody that's just about to die?'

“So, I quashed this seemingly repugnant thought. But, when I returned home, people started to ask about the time in Switzerland. You could see they were conflicted: at once trying to restrain themselves and back off, out of respect, but also dying to ask, 'what did it taste like? How fast did it work?' So I started telling people fragments; these fragments became stories, and I began to realise that this ought to be something more. It was around April that I decided I wanted to do a play about it.”

Allyson was also a woman of the theatre. The couple first met through a touring socialist theatre company in the West Country (“doing good theatre too, not just wanky agitprop stuff”), and so the feeling that he needed to write a play about her experience felt natural and “right” to Larner. “The first thing I did was write a single page—a proposal—for James Seabright, the producer," he says. "I wrote a very brief poetic summary of going to Switzerland, getting on a plane, why I was on a plane, what was wrong with Allyson. I decided where I wanted the play to go: a message of hope, something positive. After that, a sense of catharsis took over and I wrote tirelessly—details of her illness, the nature of multiple sclerosis, the drugs she was on, the process of application to Dignitas—probably ending up with ten times the amount of material that appeared onstage.”

Was it tempting, I ask, to turn the show into a political manifesto? “There were many overtly political parts of the play—facts, figures, statistics—that we took out quite early on in rehearsals. There is a temptation in any ethical or political debate to try to remain standing on an aloof moral cliff. The religious right are particularly guilty of this, looking down judgementally on what life 'should be like'. Individual cases or feelings are ignored. But if one's emotions are stirred by an individual's story, and it's a wholly true story, then I think this is a valuable addition to any debate. The fact that I experienced it and now I am performing it renders the piece politically relevant without having to ostensibly preach.”

Larner is well-known at the Fringe for the award-winning comic musicals The Translucent Frogs of Quuup and On The Island of Aars. I ask him about the transition from the farcical and silly to something a little more personally significant. “This is clearly a more intensely personal and serious show than my previous Fringe offerings. But oddly, it has been a far easier production both to write and to perform in. In the end, it's just me and a chair. Even as I get used to it, and it becomes a piece of music or a piece of theatre, it doesn't stop being the experience I had with Allyson, and hence it flows freely as a monologue – the description of the Dignitas house, for example, I don't even have to remember, because when I close my eyes, I'm still there. I can see it all perfectly.”

He quotes Larkin: “'Since someone will forever be surprising/A hunger in himself to be more serious'. This process has been massively personally significant. And, without sounding pompous, I think that this play is important. I very much would like it to take some place on the stage of the debate around assisted suicide. I'm proud of the writing of it, and I'm proud of the production of it. It's moving, yes, but, greater than that, it is a real story, and there are real people out there who are really suffering, just as Allyson did, and just as needlessly. In my opinion, there is a horrible vacuum in our country's legislation that causes its people terrible pain. Hopefully, for those who are willing to listen, I can help demonstrate some of our country's shortcomings.”