Marc Brew and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: An Accident/A Life

Norwich Theatre Royal
Brew revisits the car crash at the beginning of his ballet career that killed his three companions and left him paraplegic

Not quite dance, not quite theatre, An Accident/A Life is more like a multimedia, queasily hallucinatory staging of a story that puts the body of a dancer at its centre. That dancer is Marc Brew, and the story revisits the traumatic turning point in his life when, at the beginning of his ballet career, the car he was in was hit by a drunk driver. All three of his companions died; Brew survived but was left paraplegic, aged 20. The story he tells is harrowing, touching, brutal and tender, but what makes this feel like a work of almost classical tragedy – you will absolutely experience fear, pity and catharsis – is its notably unclassical treatment of the staging, the body and its voice.

The set is simple, symmetrical, and devastatingly effective: two screens flank a car that first sits impassively on the ground and is later hoisted up to hang perilously above the stage, like a traumatic memory that defines everything around it. Two figures in crash dummy costumes serve both as supplementary characters (clinicians, nurses, even alter egos of Brew’s fragmented self) and as stagehands, moving around bits of set, or using hand-held cameras to relay scenes on to the screens.