JADAR

★★★★★

Dear Annie, I Hate You, created and written by Samantha Ipema (who stars alongside Eleanor House), is currently running at Riverside Studios, following a sell-out run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is directed by James Metayard, who also serves as dramaturgust alongside Dan Balfour. It has sound design by Balfour, set and lighting design by Hugo Dodsworth, video design by Douglas Coghlan and Dan Light, movement direction by Jade Hackett, and fight and intimacy choreography by Robin Hellier.

Dear Annie begins as a one-woman show, in a studio filled with wires and television screens. Initially, our protagonist, Sam, is slow and measured and uses these props to introduce us to some of the chemical workings of the brain. Science-lesson style, we learn how the brain’s anticipation of certain moments trigger the release of certain hormones and how new events reinforce existing or create new neural patterns. We learn how the brain’s perception of new events are often guided by earlier life altering events.

For Sam, she can pinpoint key moments in her life: for one, the moment she met her older brother, Micah, a boy with Downs Syndrome who was adopted from South Korea when Sam was three. Or the start of high school, learning to fit in and be cool as the brain perceives these things as necessary for survival.

In the early parts of the performance, we navigate Sam’s early life through this lens: charming high school anecdotes, a newfound love for soccer, incidents with friends, and boys, et cetera, aided by the clunky television screens and wires which sit around her on stage, representing her brain, as she tells her story. We see clips of her friends, parents, and brother as they weigh in on her life. But ultimately, this is Sam’s show, which leaves us wondering, who is Annie?

After Sam is hit in the head with a soccer ball during an important game, she goes to hospital to check if everything’s okay. Seemingly, everything is fine, no concussion — she can go back to life as normal. And then, a woman in the audience huffs and storms out of her seat and heads behind the large plastic curtains at the back of the stage. She soon returns, full-glam in a pink fur coat and tights, to interrupt Sam’s monologue by singing the opening lines of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. As Sam struggles to take back her show, Annie (Eleanor House), rudely refuses to cede and insists upon being a technical difficulty uprooting Sam’s show, singing a series of cheesy pop hits which narrowly relate to the situation. I understand that some adjustments were made after House broke her wrist during a recent performance, but you wouldn’t know it — she is vivacious, energetic and her scenes fill the stage. “Annie”, of course, is Sam’s newly-discovered brain aneurysm, personified, uprooting not only her show, but her life.

After her diagnosis, the rug is pulled out from beneath Sam’s feet. Dear Annie artfully tugs between Annie’s outlandish, obnoxious behaviour and Sam’s muddling through distress and avoidance as she deals with her new diagnosis as a twenty-year-old college student on spring break. While often bold, camp, and playful, Dear Annie is marked by the dark gallow’s humour of a young woman dealing with a life-changing diagnosis. The bodacious Annie is a tool which Sam uses to discuss the realities of the situation in a more palatable way, for example, as a glitzy game show host who announces, cheerfully, the choices which Sam now has. Is the answer, A) Have the life altering surgery, and potentially die, or B) Don’t have the surgery, and potentially die? It’s morbidly funny, quite literally, and not for the faint of heart.

In the second half of the show, after making her difficult decision, Sam shows us, no holds barred, her live uncensored brain surgery on video. With fair warning and the option to leave before the video begins, I made the mistake of toughing it out for the sake of the review. Unfortunately ,squeamishness and medical anxiety got the better of me, and I didn’t make it back for the ending of the show. I’m gutted — I wish I could have stuck it out until the end. 

Dear Annie’s humour, wit, charm, staging and costume will stay with me, and I’m eagerly anticipating what creator Sam Ipema does next. The multitude of distracting screens on stage are a clever echo of Sam’s life post-diagnosis, post-surgery, trying to piece together her life in muddled fragments. I feel that Dear Annie forces us to deal with our anxieties and realities as we watch Sam deal with hers. It’s brutally honest, daring, hilarious and crushing. A must watch.

Dear Annie, I Hate You runs at Riverside Studios until June 1st.

Photo: Charlie Flint