Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You @ The Junction

It’s not a show about a déjà vu victim experiencing an explosion again and again. Honestly. The title might make it sound like that, but honestly, Molly Naylor’s Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a richer performance than that. Strictly speaking, it’s a spoken word performance, but so much emphasis is there on the performance aspect that it feels much more like a one-woman play than anything else.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a story about being blown up, certainly. In fact, that’s pretty much all you get. The staging is stripped back so far that you’ve only got that story on stage – barely any clutter, one performer and maybe three projections. So the story is paramount, and its environment lends itself to the art of listening, the art of really paying attention to the words (perhaps not surprising for a poem presented as drama).

Molly Naylor, speaking those words, tells her audience about the seventh day in July, 2005, when she got blown up on the Tube at Aldgate station. She was actually relatively unscathed – physically – and instead picked up the glamour of the survivor, the terrorist victim who walked away. Frankly, it’s the glamour she’d been craving up until that point, and maybe this is representative of a generation; not deliberately perhaps, but this idea of a generation seeking the glamour of Hollywood, then allowing a traumatic event to serve as scapegoat for all that’s wrong in their lives, certainly strikes a chord.

Alright, so ‘scapegoat’ is perhaps a little unfair. It’s not as though Naylor blames all her failings (lack of ambition, apathy, selfishness) on the bombings of July 7th. Rather, the bombing becomes a filter through which she (and we) can see things differently. The bombing shines light on aspects of her life that we could already see, but maybe not clearly. So, sure, she’s drifting through life in a happy-go-lucky way before the bombing, but this is only really obvious once the ‘happy’ has been removed and we can all question the ‘lucky’. Her lack of ambition comes strikingly forward when she flees London to rural Wales, but her dead-end jobs before then should have been giveaways.

But what I came back to time and again in Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You was those words. Molly Naylor keeps up a steady stream of them and they fill the black box space. Maybe she doesn’t need the projections to set her locations; the words are enough. This script (really a poem) sings with the rhythmic power of poetry, it’s highly lyrical and sometimes self-consciously so. The fact that it’s a poem being performed like a monologue (it’s not staged like a spoken word performance) means that Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You suffers slightly in a theatre – these words have to spoken in a certain way for the poetry to work – because there’s a certain lack of spontaneity. Naylor’s easy-going, improvised opening few words of greeting (and closing words, to plug her book of the show) serve only to make her rehearsed, scripted tone of voice even more obvious.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a self-consciously theatrical staging of a highly lyrical rendition of the July 7th bombings and their aftermath. It’s touching, certainly, occasionally funny, sometimes awkward but always poetic and heartfelt.