A celebration of mistake makers

I SPENT the first five minutes of this play cursing myself for yet again not properly reading the synopsis before putting myself down to review a show, and finding myself in yet another audience participation event. It was an uneasy and intimidating five minutes as I frantically tried to come up with my own Oh F**k Moment - of which there are a countless many, but I was faced with a mild case of brain paralysis.

One guy had driven his fathers mobile home into a sweet shop, how do you follow that? I feebly exaggerated a typo I once made and got the sympathetic laughter I’d hoped for.

However, I should make it clear that after the initial five minutes, if it was in fact that long, this became one of the most enjoyable and thought provoking shows I had ever been to.

Set around a boardroom table, Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe examine the poetic guts of mistakes - arguing that screwing up, and enduring that horrific ‘Oh F**k Moment’ that we all know so well, where you wish the ground would swallow you up, is the truest and most terrifying moment of our lives. It was fascinating to hear them speak of how a thousand years ago that moment would come when encountering a tiger in the wild, or be wrongly penned as a witch, but now is entering the wrong number onto a spreadsheet or emailing the wrong person.

Naturally there was a lot of laughter as Walker and Thorpe skilfully led us through a variety of scenarios, and a willing and engaging audience didn’t hold back in their disclosures. But also there were moments of real poignancy - Thorpe speaks of missing his fathers death in a hospice by a matter of minutes, or the story of a man who literally died of embarrassment (I won’t go into the graphic sexual details). Who are we to judge someone else’s mistakes? We all have them, we all learn from (most) of them. Why does shame become one of our biggest motivators? And often a motivation NOT to do things?

For anyone who has ever locked their keys in the car, been caught cheating, literally had their dog eat their homework or, as one woman confessed, poured chicken stock into the vegetarian dish at a dinner party (we didn’t ask whether she then served it), this is a show for you. Days later I’m still thinking about it and smiling - and I can’t give it higher praise than that.

Jamie Smith

Verdict: Just brilliant.