You know what it’s like. You’re in
London for a long weekend and you think you’ll go and see some of the stuff
that you’re always hearing and reading about. Something cultural. Literary.
Something you can write about on your blog. So you think you’ll have a look at
the culture guide in the Guardian over breakfast, but when you get to the cafe
you realise it’s only Friday, and the guide comes with the Saturday paper.
So you walk across Hampstead Heath
instead, admiring the variety and happiness of all the walking dogs. After you're caught in a downpour, you’re forced to fight your way past the baby buggies and
get into a cafe and order a latte. And you hear that A House Where Keats Lived
is just down the hill so you go and have a look, but it costs a fiver to go in
so you just peer in through the window and then go to the library next door. The
Keats Community Library, which has a beautiful stained glass dome in the
ceiling and a lot of books you’d like to read.
The papers you sit down with all have listings in the back of things to go to, but you don’t know where anywhere is in London. How far is it to Chalk Farm? Would Holland Park entail a lot of tube changes? And you want it to be good, whatever you choose. You’re going to be investing time and money and expectation to get there, a heavy burden for an exhibition that might well turn out to be two prints and a video installation of a cat. Maybe you should just stick to the Tate.
Then you pick up a copy of Time
Out. An entry catches your eye, and you turn to your boyfriend to say, this
looks interesting, it’s poetry about heart failure. And to pre-empt a momentary
expression of doubt from crossing his face, you offer a get-out clause. It’s at
the Royal Free Hospital, is that too far? But instead he leans over, says, that’s
just down the road. Five minutes, max. Shall we go?
You reach for your phone to look at
the time and see that you have a couple of hours to spare. Not long enough to
go far and, after all, there’s no need to factor in travel time. More coffee?
Beer, even? But somewhere you’ve seen a signpost for a National Trust house.
You think you remember where, so you go up the wrong road, stop at a pub with
cushions on the chairs that are too big and push you off the seat. There are
more babies, more quietly filled buggies pushed by young women with long hair.
Au pairs? What are they giving the babies to keep them so quiet? Intravenous Mozart?
You find the signpost but not the
road it is pointing to, so you make a diversion into an antiquarian bookshop
where the gaps between the shelves are so full of crap that you can’t get past,
and you lean at a ridiculous angle to try and see the titles, but you can’t, so
you make a polite excuse and go back to the signpost.
And this time, you go the right
way, and end up back where you started. And the National Trust house is there,
a poured concrete Modernist block of flats designed by, and for, Ernö
Goldfinger. And your boyfriend tells you that the Goldfinger in James Bond is
named after this Goldfinger, because Ian Fleming met him and they didn’t hit it
off, or Ian Fleming met Goldfinger's cousin and didn’t like what he heard. And
Goldfinger is a great name, after all. You admire the house and the paintings
and the view over Hampstead and wish that you lived there, and all the
paintings were yours. But you’re glad that you don’t have the name of an Ian
Fleming character. Pussy Galore. Mary Goodnight. Tracy.
And so to the hospital, where there
are sandwiches laid out in the Atrium for those who have come to watch the
performance, but food in a hospital feels a bit icky, so you just sit down and
drink some water. And Richard Tyrone Jones, six foot of ginger charm, wanders
out and begins the show.
He is active, engaging. We cycle
with him on his way to poetry performances, wonder why we are so tired,
struggle with breathlessness, and marvel at the colour, viscosity and quantity of
our phlegm. Richard Tyrone Jones and his Big Heart. A heart that swelled and
failed and landed him in the intensive care ward of the hospital. Animations
flicker around him as he explains what it was like. Much fun is made of bodily
functions going awry, of heart-stopping nurses and the fear of ending up back
in Dudley. And we know he got better, because here he is in front of us, but
still we hold our breath as the treatments fail to work, as his steps get
slower, his prospects darker.
In between are poems. Poems from
his hospital bed, from his hopeless seat on a featureless street in Dudley,
from the moments when it looks as if it’s all getting better and times when it
appears that never will. Because, when you’re a writer, all experience is copy,
and life-threatening and messy illnesses are better copy than most. Especially
when you end up back on your feet, even if you do need an implant next to your
heart which will shock you back to existence if your pulse gets too slow.
The bravura end is a declamation of
the genetic baddies who are lurking in our collective DNA, mostly without
answers, seeming to come from nowhere. You hope you never have to hear too much
about them. We can’t stay for the Q&A session which is, after all, perhaps
aimed more at the patients who are here because they have heart disease,
because they are being treated in this very hospital. Just like Richard
himself.
Richard Tyrone Jones's Big
Heart has already been a success in Buxton. This summer, it will be happening
again at the Edinburgh Fringe, and then touring the UK. You should go and see
it. You really should.
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