REVIEW: Good Grief at the Underbelly Colgate in the Iron Belly, Edinburgh Fringe

Ugly Bucket Theatre are a Liverpool-based physical theatre and clown company not afraid to delve into uncomfortable subject matters and make us laugh about it. As recipients of the New Diorama, Underbelly and Methuen Drama’s Untapped Award 2022, there is clearly energy behind this young company making their latest show, Good Grief, a contender for a place on your Edinburgh Fringe Festival dance card.

On brand for Ugly Bucket Theatre, Good Grief examines the grieving process that takes place before and after a good friend dies, through physical comedy, verbatim text and… techno dancing. It follows the life of a man who we meet pre-birth in the womb of his mother through to his afterlife after suffering from cancer of the intestine. Right from the beginning, he is subject to the hard truths of life. People and animals come and go and after a montage of macabre tragedies, he is paralysed by doom and eventually must also face his own mortality when sickness strikes. Both he and his loved ones are now subject to grieve a life disappearing. Sounds grim right? Well, not today. Obviously, the best way to address all of this is through clown!

REVIEW: Good Grief, starring Sian Clifford and Nikesh Patel

At a time when theatres have been closed for so many months and the daily news is full of the deaths of thousands from Covid and every one of us knows someone affected by these events, it may seem challenging to spend an hour in front of a laptop watching a film about the grief one feels when facing the death of a loved one. Yet this simply shot film Good Grief is beautifully made, emotionally engaging and helps one understand the five stages of grief. 

The process of dealing with grief is helped by understanding the natural reactions we face as humans when we experience it. The five stages begin with Denial and spread into Anger and are easy to understand. The third stage is Bargaining where the grieving person clings to threads of hope and feels willing to do anything to alleviate the pain before becoming depressed about the situation and their reactions. Only after these four stages do we pass on to acceptance and can then start to return to a normal life. The time in each phase and the boundaries between them are blurred. Indeed, as we continue in the third lockdown it is easy to see parallels in our own coping mechanisms to the forced restrictions compounded by the grief of losing loved ones.