Clik here to view.
Terry Saunders: Wistful tales of doomed love and heartbreak
There’s something about Terry Saunders‘ low-key, and even lo-fi, tales which makes them sweet and endearing despite their rather bleak outlook. His latest show, Six and a Half Loves, follows the intersecting lives of six people and three perfect relationships destined never to reach fruition.
It was set up at the outset that this would be a yarn unlike the typical romantic comedy – a piece where true love doesn’t win out in the end. Telling the story with the aid of his iPad and a projector screen, Saunders proceeded to weave these characters into a moving yet funny narrative, full of humour and heart.
That visual backdrop came courtesy of a series of self-animated images – bold colours and broad sketches, making up for what they lack in detail with oodles of naive charm. The vignette, broken down into chapters, was packed with little details but Saunders’ unassuming style of storytelling is also heartwarmingly naive in its own way, presenting a tangled web of emotions and broken hearts in a melancholy yet somehow uplifting way.
His strength lay in taking universally recognised themes and signals and turning them into a fictional world populated by characters which illustrated the complex nature of love and relationships. Thankfully, in a piece that was so downbeat for the most part, it was Saunders’ delightfully witty turns of phrase and carefully drawn – in more than one sense of the word – characters which provided the humour and relief.
Beautifully told, Saunders ramped up the tragedy as the relationships unfolded, with it gradually becoming clear just how things might have been about to go wrong, and the pleasingly child-like drawing style just adds to the heavy-hearted feel. With a commanding grasp of storytelling and the kind of bittersweet writing which has seen him garner comparisons with the likes of Daniel Kitson and Alan Bennett, Saunders is a joy when he hits full stride and this was a wonderfully evocative hour of comedy.
