A Character That Cannot Die

A performance to make you laugh about Mr Peanut - Death - whose memory is a film.

Death is the curve of the road. Dying is just not being seen. Earth is made of sky. Nobody ever got lost. Everything is truth and passage.

Fernando Pessoa

Love and Death are the two outermost experiences in our lives. They embrace each other and remind us that the poets call the acme of carnal union ‘small death’.

So why do we fear Death? We can strive to exorcise it, but it waits patiently for our last action and word.

Where does Death live when we don't see it? In ourselves? Is our body its body? In which appearances and forms does it appear to us? Can Death seduce us? Make us laugh? Can Death fall in love and make us fall in love? Can Death give life to a child? What truth blooms when we meet it?

Theatre is vision: a performance craves to show the invisible. A character that cannot die imagines and materializes births, adventures, deaths and resurrections of Mr Peanut, the character with a skull head, who has participated for over forty years in Odin Teatret's performances, often as a protagonist.

The performance is a love declaration by the actress to the character she has given life to. In deafening streets and silent rooms Julia Varley reveals to us Mr Peanut’s many grotesque and astonishing incarnations that have accompanied her journey on this planet.

Theatre scenes and film extracts alternate to evoke events from the past and imagine a future reality that awaits us. The essence of this reality is a dance of opposites in which pain and absence include tenderness, poetry and regeneration.

I'm not far away, I'm on the other side, just around the corner.
All is well.
Don't cry if you love me: your smile is my peace.

Henry Scott Holland