Liverpool Sound and Vision 8.5/10
Cast: Chris Thorpe, Jorge Andrade.
There are many futures that become the legend and home for the question of what if? A certain place in to which the once thought possible becomes a loose strand fluttering in the wind of uncertainty, hangs in the air for the realm of the hypothetical and to come and gather it up. Speculative fiction is rife with such stories, the turn of a single feather, the mark of a wrong turn, all leading to roads and arguably other futures in which Your Best Guess is as good as anyone’s but makes for the most riveting of tales and astonishing deep thought.
Portuguese theatre company, Mala Voadora, use this idea to in their two- handed production, Your Best Guess, and it one that is ultimately satisfying, one that leaves you with questions and almost a sense of self-interrogation, a play that sees the audience enjoy the moment but understand that all the plans for the future we make are but whispers in the wind, a possible stand of futures clutched together like a promise, one we wish to fulfil but one that can unravel at the seams and remove that prospect for good.
If things could turn out differently, if for instance we could save the brilliant light of Kurt Cobain from his own darkness, if we had the imagination to vote with our conscious instead of our fears, where would the world be today, where would we stand.
By blending the sense of a psychotherapist’s session, a grief counsellor helping a man come to terms with a moment in which his wife suffers a near fatal aneurism and that of several stories that use the audible imagery of the what if, a moment in which life can fracture or be viewed as splitting apart. What comes across is a very different type of theatre, it is one that isn’t content with getting into your mind and making you think, asking an audience to truly see the choice before them with clarity, it gets down into your soul; it disturbs with wonderful candour the way you believe the way your life has taken and the journey that could have been.
A marvellous piece of theatre, Your Best Guess is always worth exploring.
Ian D. Hall