I Worried My Heart Wasn't Big Enough

Sharron Devine makes “human specific” work, and this show is an intimate one-on-one experience. Short and sweet, I worried My Heart Wasn’t Big Enough nevertheless proves to be softly moving. Giving yourself up to an interactive, individual performance encounter demands a degree of vulnerability, but Devine upholds that to fashion a delicate, truthful interaction that seems more than the sum of its simple parts. A meditation on mothers and daughters, grief and hope, it is deeply personal yet only completed through the act of sharing.   

You enter a small room; there are refreshments, toys to play with, plangent cello music on headphones. Devine is in the next room: a warm, whispering performer, rummaging through old memories, showing you childhood photographs and books. Then she dresses you up – you are her mum, who has passed away too young. This may sound morbid, but in Devine’s hands, it feels like a gift.

Finally, there’s footage of her little daughter, twirling and dancing with gorgeous unselfconsciousness. I began to worry my own heart wasn’t big enough. Devine smiles, and tells how much she misses her mum – but that that grief was transformed by having a child. Devine sees her relationship with her mother now mirrored in her relationship with her daughter.

Bringing up another tiny human being inevitably transports you back to your own childhood, and that is what Devine’s show does too for the participant. From the décor to the books to the sweets, there’s likely something that will give you your own Proustian rush in a work about seeing the past tranfromed into the future.