A History of Paper

The plan had been to watch A History of Paper during the Fringe but then I learned it was on in Glasgow and that seemed safer. Olly and I spent our twenties taking plays to the Edinburgh Fringe, him writing, me directing. We watched more plays there than I can possibly remember and were vicious about most of them with the confidence and certainty of youth. There are other reasons I’m skirting the Fringe for a while, but this emotional motherload is the main one for watching this elsewhere.

In Iz, the first play we took to the Fringe, three men attempt to reckon with the loss of the woman they all loved. One of them, her husband, finds a book, her diary of notes and scraps and hopes, and realises – shocked - he barely knew her at all. I thought of this scene while watching A History of Paper, in which the experience is inverted: the tragedy here is that though the husband knew her so well, their time was still too short. This month it’s twenty-six years since Olly and I met on our first day at Leeds University, but our time was still too short.

Watching A History of Paper was strangely like the experience it described. Even the stuff about Pizza Express, a chain Olly introduced me to in 1998 and remained obsessed with for the next 25 years, is echt  Emanuel. I loved this feeling of being close to him, of recognising him in his rhythms and obsessions. At the same time I yearned for something of the Iz experience. I wanted him to surprise me as he did so often, with a completely untenable opinion or an outrageous statement. My knowing my friend was not yet complete. Our time was too short. And of course I wanted to be hurt by this play, which I deserve for remaining alive. 

Such is grief. No-one knew that more than Olly. People often say that he wrote a lot of plays about grief. Actually all of them are about love. But there’s no love without grief, and loss makes love shout louder.

So I went in prepared for emotional bruising, but wasn’t the obvious things that hit me. When she died I was unnerved by being unmoved. But every time I laughed out loud I was suckerpunched. Is this the last time Olly makes me laugh? Every moment of beauty was outrageous in its finality. How dare this be the last audacious pulling together of disparate threads in a joke that makes me laugh and choke? How dare the universe.

Everyone filed out at the end and I couldn’t bear to leave the theatre. In the final sequence of the play the male character had made faltering steps to move on with his life. Even though he wrote it before he knew he was ill – before he was ill at all, maybe - it’s too tempting to see it as Olly’s message to us. ‘Feel grateful for the time we had, not the time we didn’t. Take a deep breath and do it.’ But I’m not ready for the play to end.
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Finally dragging myself from the room, an usher outside was packing up from selling copies of the text. I asked to buy one and it took what felt like fully five minutes for her to get the ipad back online and connect it to the card reader. She kept apologising. I would have stayed all night.

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