Theatre

Leisa Rea's (Bad) Pension Plan

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 17 August, 2011 10:38

I have found my guru. Leisa Rea’s life has been an epic ascent to the nadir, and she has reached the bottom, triumphant. She has failed at everything and reached a zen-like understanding with hopelessness, emblazoning it across an inspirational banner: “We Can’t All Win”.

Pension Plan is part self-help motivational session, part game show, part autobiography. Party games that nobody wins and gingerbread fetus cookies we all get to nibble (“Who’ll get the eye?” she giggles) won the crowd and make for a beautiful show. My only disappointment is that she says she’s never doing it again. Rea’s hopping pixie Indie Rock Chick persona is almost certainly her real self, battling depression with good humour.

But while the surface message might be to just give up and relax into losing, there is actually a surprising amount of positivity and wisdom lurking in the few empty corners of the medicine cabinet. “Pretend you are confident. It’s all bollocks anyway.” Actually, the real message is probably more helpful than that. Society is now so geared to relentless success.

To eternally expanding economies. To finding self-identity and pride in working ever longer hours to achieve impossible career heights. Rea seems (at least to me) to be saying it’s okay to fail, because human beings are flawed and to aspire for perfection, to give up trying to be human, is the only failure that matters. The show’s message is almost certainly far more subtle, much deeper, less naff than I have bumblingly described it. As a theatre critic, though, I am trying to sum up a show, which is trying to sum up a woman’s life, in a brief review. I was always going to fail.

Camden Fringe Festival page

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