Story of a Rabbit

Overview

Welsh "emerging artist" Hugh Hughes opens his Story of a Rabbit with an offering of a cup of tea and a PowerPoint slide reading 'DEATH'. Launching into this usually morbid subject with his signature charm and quirk — fervently pointing out that the use of PowerPoint slides and mood music made this performance a "really quite extraordinary" multimedia presentation — Hughes interweaves the story of his neighbour's dead rabbit with the death of his own father in a way that is both hilarious and heartfelt.

The audience is addressed both as a collective and as individual beings made up of tiny atoms (and sub-atoms and sub-sub-atoms) and invited to draw on personal experiences to interpret Hughes' story. That story jumps between hilarious interpretative dance scenes of his first encounter with the rabbit to sombre re-enactments of his train journey back to Bangor, North Wales before the two stories are linked together in a fantastic culmination of the collision between imagination and memory (Hughes uses the quote from Albert Einstein, "Imagination is more important than knowledge.")

Hughes' animated delivery and boyish fascination with the role of props and lighting might seem barriers to really tear-jerking moments, but they only heighten our immersion in the story, whether it's the graph he draws to figure out where his father's soul is currently flying in relation to his train journey, the action-man doll performing his "secret acrobat" father's final move, or even a potato that encourages us to imagine how enormous we would be if every atom was the size of a large root vegetable.

Story of a Rabbit will make you laugh, possibly cry, and maybe even get a cup of tea. If Hughes really did, as his Twitter account claims, get to Australia by swimming, it was entirely worth the journey.