“Verbatim means ‘In exactly the same words’. Fact. As it is. With all artifice removed. Which is why the form is so appropriate to Stillmine. Raw experience. No cover. No shield. Nothing between us and the fact. The words, the actual words tether us to the loss. To Loss.

Yet what is remarkable about this play, Stillmine, is that the author, Isabelle Defaut has, in her composition, untethered the voices to become, well, music. Nothing could be more appropriate. Loss is by its nature beyond words. 

The way she does this is to do, I think, with time. And I do not only mean time-ing. Though that is masterly. The cutting and timing of the grief and griefs, fact and facts, contained within the multiple voices joins the everyday with the ever and forever. The voices insistence, their rise and fall, their dissonance and sometimes harmony, draw you into the harmonics and notes of their loss. So the whole becomes symphonic.  A choir of experience.

But there is another sense in which time is at the centre of this piece. Boris Pasternak, I believe, said “Music is the noise of Time.” Stillmine in its sense of fragility, unflinching vulnerability and exposure, captures something much larger than the intimacy of each of the voices at its centre. It speaks of a wider fragility. The fragility fo OUR time. A sense in which we all stand in a place of deep uncertainty. It describes the thread we are all continuously part of. Reaching backwards and forwards in time; and this thread, this continuity has never felt more precarious.

Which is why this piece which links the personal and political, the mundane and the numinous, loss and honouring is truly a composition for our time, that taps into a collective grief as well as private loss, requiring us all to begin ‘…to learn to live with a new you’…. Or a new us.”

- Simon McBurney OBE, Artistic Director of Complicité