2 minute read
TOM TAKES HEART DR SIMON BARKER
from ONA 106
TOM TAKES HEART
BY DR SIMON BARKER HEAD OF ENGLISH
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Tom Machell (01-08) left the RGS in 2008, moving on to an English and Theatre degree at Queen Mary and Westfield, University of London (during which time he spent two years training at the New York Film Academy). Unlike many an aspiring actor, he has managed to make a subsequent success of a film, television and theatre career.
His new play, Ticker, has recently been at the Edinburgh Fringe. Its starting point was the death of his contemporary from the RGS Sixth Form, Steph McLean (06-08). It is not ‘about’ Steph. But as he says in the published text: ‘In June 2013 I lost someone who had been a big part of my life to a condition I had never heard of. Ticker is not a play about her but dedicated to one of the best people I have ever known’.
The performances were raising money for CRY (Cardiac Risk in the Young): astoundingly, 12 young people a week die from this undiagnosed disease. (It is something close to my own heart because one of the brightest and loveliest RGS students I have ever taught, Tim Douglas (99-04), ran home on a February afternoon in the Upper Sixth of 2004 and died on his own doorstep.)
All of which sounds like the play might be a bit solemn. It absolutely is not! It is a 60 minute monologue, which is a risk: Tom brings it off tremendously by inhabiting a variety of roles. The minimalist staging works powerfully and very cleverly. There’s a very beautiful plot development (no spoilers) with that character Scott. Yes, it’s about grief: ‘The pleasure you get from punching a cheery one-eyed colourful unicorn in a hospital dining room is something that should be advertised more. It’s better than therapy…’ (It was such a pleasure to see it punched!) ‘They say the worst type of grief is a death that didn’t need to happen… With this death, if she had done a test, she’d still be here and that’s not okay’.
I asked Tom how much of the play was autobiographical. ‘70% not.’ Brilliant additional reply: ‘the anger is autobiographical’. The master playwright Samuel Beckett says that ‘all that matters is the laugh and the tear’. Ticker does both.
It is very, very funny and very, very moving (warning: a bit filthy too. Beckett would like all of that). It is performed terrifically. It made me cry to see Jeremy Thomas (77-05), my predecessor as Head of English (79-95), and subsequently Head of Drama, acknowledged in the text as one of the ‘very few special people who didn’t let me give up’. Why? We both recalled the most exacting of directors. ‘I just thought he was the best.’ Cheering to hear that flame kept alive.
