IT DIDN'T GET ME is a new site-specific theatre project combining live storytelling, documentary interviews and outdoor performance.
Set within a long trench of exposed earth, the work follows a man attempting to explain a severe mental health crisis from his past. Armed with research, recorded interviews and hard-won conclusions, he invites an audience to hear what he has learned about survival. As the performance unfolds, the evidence he has gathered begins to dismantle his certainty. What starts as a lecture gradually becomes an excavation of the assumptions, inherited behaviours and ideas about identity that shaped him long before the crisis itself.
Developed through conversations with psychologists, artists, writers, academics and people with lived experience, the project borrows the structure of investigative documentary filmmaking whilst remaining rooted in live theatre and site-specific performance.
At its heart, IT DIDN'T GET ME is a play about the distance between the person we become to survive and the person we might become if we were willing to unlearn who we thought we had to be. Growth through erasure and how the patriarchy damages men too.
Jonathan McGrath is a Theatre Director, Facilitator and Lecturer who has presented theatre events all over the world. He is an associate lecturer at six universities across the UK and mentors artists working in a range of art forms. Jonathan specialises in training artists for the somatic/psychological challenges that performance brings. Jonathan is Producer at futureeverything.
