Theatre

Richard Tyrone Jones has a Big Heart

John Underwood | Monday 8 August, 2011 13:30

“My heart,” muses performance poet, quondam comedian and heart failure sufferer Richard Tyrone Jones, “rebelled against me like a cardiac Syria.” This combination of inventive wordplay and disarming confession is very much representative of the debut show from Utter! Director RTJ, who almost died last year when he fell ill with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy shortly after his thirtieth birthday. Blending frank and frequently graphic descriptions of his ongoing illness with bursts of frenetic comedy which hit far more often than they miss (still, save us from more ‘in de Nile’ jokes…), Jones’ storytelling is confident and fluid, drawing the audience into anecdotes about everything from the cokehead with whom he shared a heart failure ward to his experience of sperm donation – “This is how ginger people breed” – and relieving himself into something that looked awfully like a papier-mâché hat. However, it’s during his all-too-infrequent recitations that Jones really comes into his own. His poems flit from brutally honest blank verse about the four seconds he was technically dead to an unashamedly joyful rhyming paean to life, with room for a Tom Lehrer-inspired list of genetic ailments on the way, and they are uniformly superb. He’ll be back next year with a more high-tech show which will hopefully give this extraordinary poet more chance to explore his true vocation.

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