Like Father, Like Son: A Review by Wouter Hillaert
This is a translation of a review of David Labi’s stage show Pieces of a Man – by Wouter Hillaert, published in Pzazz – original link here.
From “Pieces of a Man” performance in NTGent, Ghent, Belgium on Dec 8, 2022. Photo by Victoriano Moreno, courtesy of Mestizo Arts Platform
That neither you nor I know David Labi proves to be no disgrace. He’s still searching for who he is himself, as he lets us know in Pieces of a Man. Even though he’s now over forty with his hip moustache, he still doesn’t know where to go. Born in London and having later emigrated to Buenos Aires, Japan, and Berlin, he only recently ended up in Brussels, along with his love – thanks to a fist on the table from a well-known German psychiatrist. Labi has been in youth work, made documentaries and music videos, written scripts for TV news, edited a magazine, and worked in advertising. Today, he makes his living as coach and consultant, and runs an “ethical storytelling agency“. In terms of pieces, that can stack up...
And is theatre maker now his twelfth profession? To find the anchor point in his fragmented existence, Labi decided a few years back to dig into the equally wandering life of his domineering Jewish father, now dead for 20 years. “Pieces of a man” is the account of this quest, an attempt to put the pieces together. Via Mestizo Arts Platform and with Johan Petit of MartHA!tentative as coach, Labi has ended up with a solo show that presents itself as documentary stand-up comedy, but gradually becomes less populated with dry jokes and British “wit”. More and more feeling seeps in among the pictures he projects, the family stories he tells, the similarities that reveal themselves. Pieces of a Man aims to stir rather than boil out.
Enter Marcello Labi, the Sephardic bon-vivant with lush beard and thick cigar who saddled his son with a lifelong issue. His picture alone, conjured up on screen via the clicker in Labi’s back pocket, glows with self-aggrandisement. Imposing and authoritarian by nature, good with women and booze, bad at confiding in his offspring, regular customer and risk merchant at casinos, always engaged in dealings with foreign countries: in everything, the father turned out to be the opposite of his introverted son. With half-truths he enveloped himself. Naturally, they became entire myths for posterity.
Even world history carried father Marcello along in his dealings. Born in Libya as a member of the Jewish community and carried across the water to Mussolini's Italy as a baby during World War II, he grew up further in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and eventually ended up in London with a thriving travel agency for trips to young Israel, an office that became the target of a bomb attack in 1984 in full Cold War - we get a snippet of British TV news about it. The best stories are the ones you don't need to make anything more up about, because they sound pretty insane on their own.
Pieces of a Man thus reminds you of the rich patchwork called Europe, but where every possible history ultimately just comes down to father, mother, and children. To unfinished business with your parents. To childhood traumas that haunt you for life. To running away, wandering, and returning. To struggle, repudiation, and reconciliation. On transmitted suffering and inter-generational legacies, both tangible and intangible. On stories, stories, stories – and on having to tell them again and again – to still give the fragmentation a place and create a bond that there is never enough time or courage for in other ways. With each new history about father Marcello, Pieces of a Man also further clothes our shared history.
“Labi’s focus on his own family line does not narrow the theme of identity, but detaches it from any cultural reduction into a broader patchwork of psychology, migration, trauma, and intra-familial distress.”
David Labi is not an actor, nor does he try to pretend to be one. Rather, he uses his skills as a presenter and salesman. Directly addressing the audience, occasionally with a direct question or exhortation to someone in the front row, he openly plays his trump cards. First and foremost is his native English: straightforward, spare in terms of poetry, always with a witticism ready. Labi also has the ability to make situations vivid with just a few strokes of his pen. From his father's heroic escape attempt from a London hospital, to the run-down Argentine hostel to which he himself fled: these are not so much brought to life physically as minimally verbally painted.
Yet what makes this solo a theatrical performance, rather than a stand-up show or just a telling, is the framework Labi spins around those paintings: a narrative structure, as simple as it is ingenious, that arranges his material for the viewer into an exciting narrative. He hangs it on five “valuables“ – five pieces of jewellery his father once gave him as a token of trust, from an old ring to a necklace bearing the Hebrew word for “life“. One by one, Labi draws those jewellery items throughout his solo on black plates that he displays on stage. Like cliffhangers in his story, always with a drawing silence, those sketching moments each time begin a new chapter. Together, at the end, these treasures not only form the material traces of a paternal biography but also act as the anchor points Labi has always missed in his own story. They dramatically embody a life-and-death journey of the wandering Jew. Like father, like son.
So many solo biographical narratives we’ve seen pass in recent years, but Pieces of a Man is a master class in how to draw a whole life against the canvas of history. Labi’s focus on his own family line does not narrow the theme of identity, but manages to just detach it from any cultural reduction, into a much broader patchwork of psychology, migration, trauma, and intra-familial distress.
Content-wise, this solo also stands out. Whereas in recent months we have mostly seen portraits of and about women - from the devout medieval Beatrice to the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré - Pieces of a Man turns out to be a multiple reflection on masculinity: how (these) men, in the absence of solid ground and self-evident emotionality, get lost among all the dutifulness of authority, entrepreneurship, familial responsibility and fictional heroism. In times when the alt-right is so much on the rise, such reflections upon masculinity are never inconvenient. Conclusions Labi leaves to the viewer himself.
The ultimate strength of his narration is that he enters into it so honestly as a narrator, but without being absorbed into it. Even though his own identity is at stake - which makes it just as moving - his critical self-awareness keeps enough ironic distance. The result is an engaging double tension. Little by little, the son deconstructs the father to his vulnerability as a small boy and as a sick man, only to establish ever more clearly that he himself is more the double of it than the counter-image. Labi appropriates his father’s image, but takes perhaps the biggest step in the opposite direction himself. Like father, like son.
Pieces of a Man is one big attempt at rapprochement. What Sachli Gholamalizad's A Reason to Talk managed to unleash around motherhood in 2015, this debut now does for fatherhood: it shows the supra-cultural depth of it.
Above is a translation of a review by Wouter Hillaert, published in Pzazz – original link here.