Rated 🍯🍯🍯
Stampin’ in the Graveyard at The Cockpit is, at its heart, a fragmented exploration of memory, love, and loss. Billed as an immersive headphone experience, this production fuses poetry, live music, movement, and AI to create a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. At its core is an AI chatbot, Rose, sifting through fragments of a couple’s shared life and trying to make sense of it all.
This is no ordinary narrative. The play has garnered attention for its bold use of technology and storytelling, with critics praising its innovative blend of disjointed memories and layered themes. Elisabeth Gunawan, the performer and creator, has been lauded for her ability to embody Rose while drawing the audience into a deeply human story. Yet, amidst all this acclaim, the bee found itself a little out of step—buzzing with questions about the role of the tech, the intentions behind its fragmented narrative, and the emotional resonance of its central themes.
The Fragmented Mosaic: A Triumph of Narrative Form
Let’s start with what worked, because Stampin’ in the Graveyard gets a lot right. Its disjointed storytelling mirrors the chaos of memory—fragmentary, nonlinear, and unreliable. Through headphones, the audience is drawn into snippets of conversations between a man and a woman, whose relationship unfolds across years and fractures. These dialogues—alternately mundane and profound—invite the audience to piece together the events of their lives and their emotional evolution over time.
The play doesn’t hold your hand. Instead of a traditional narrative, we’re offered shards of intimacy: a casual car ride here, a moment of deep tension there. It’s a bold choice that forces the audience to lean in, listening not just to what is said but to what is left unsaid. The silence between words becomes a powerful storytelling tool.
The apocalyptic backdrop adds another layer of urgency. As the world collapses—hinted at through airport closures, mass evacuations, and a general sense of foreboding—the couple’s journey takes on an almost existential weight. Love and separation, belonging and exile, life and loss—they’re all distilled into these fragments of conversation, creating a mosaic that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant.
Migration and Belonging: The Heart of the Story
One of the play’s most poignant threads is migration. The woman’s story begins with her leaving her family behind at the age of 12, securing the last seat on a plane to a promised land. The details of her journey remain ambiguous—what she was escaping, who she left behind—but this ambiguity only deepens its emotional impact.
Her struggle to assimilate into a new culture while carrying the weight of her past is quietly devastating. Letters to her parents taper off, symbolizing the gradual erosion of connection to her roots. The play captures the liminality of migration—the sense of being caught between worlds, belonging fully to neither.
But migration isn’t just about physical displacement; it’s also about emotional exile. The woman’s grief over leaving her family, compounded by later losses, isolates her from those she loves. This isolation becomes a central tension in the play, underscoring how migration shapes not just where we are but who we are.
The Role of Love and Separation
At its core, Stampin’ in the Graveyard is a love story—or, perhaps more accurately, a story about love unraveling. The relationship between the man and the woman is portrayed through their conversations, which range from the trivial to the profound. Over time, these fragments reveal how love, like memory, can erode under the weight of unmet expectations, unspoken grief, and the passing of time.
The apocalyptic setting sharpens this theme, casting their relationship against the backdrop of an ending world. There’s a certain solace in this juxtaposition: even as society collapses, the couple has each other. It’s a bittersweet reminder that love, in its simplest form, can be both our greatest comfort and our greatest burden.
Buzzing Confusion: The Role of AI
And now we come to the question that kept the bee buzzing throughout the play: why the AI? Why Rose? Why snippets of code, glitchy screens, and network errors?
If the intention was to draw parallels between human memory and technological malfunction, the bee wonders if the analogy was fully realized. Human memory, after all, is a deeply emotional and purposeful process. It erases to protect, rewrites to soothe, and clings to fragments that help us make sense of our lives. AI glitches, by contrast, are arbitrary, mechanical, and devoid of meaning. While both can be “fragmented,” the comparison feels like an imperfect fit.
Of course, this is just one interpretation. Perhaps the tech was meant to add a layer of detachment, forcing the audience to confront the cold, clinical way we process stories in a digital age. Or perhaps it was meant to alienate us, mirroring the disconnection between the couple. Whatever the intent, the tech elements often felt more like a barrier than a bridge to the play’s emotional core.
Finding Comfort in the End
For all its unanswered questions, Stampin’ in the Graveyard lingers. Its fragmented storytelling, its exploration of migration and belonging, its quiet moments of love and loss—they all resonate long after the final scene. The apocalyptic backdrop, far from overwhelming the narrative, becomes a poignant reminder of what we hold onto in the face of endings: each other.
As for the tech, the bee is still buzzing with questions. Was it necessary? Did it deepen the story or distract from it? Or is the bee simply missing the point? Perhaps, like the fragments of memory that the play so beautifully captures, the purpose of the tech is something we’re meant to piece together for ourselves.
Either way, the play leaves an impression. And perhaps that’s what great theatre should do: leave us restless, questioning, and just a little bit haunted.
Three stars!
Stampin’ in the Graveyard is scheduled for performances at The Cockpit in Marylebone, London, on November 8th and 9th, 2024, as part of the Voila! Theatre Festival.
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