The audience enters the Corpus Playroom to the crackly vinyl crooning of love songs, as a couple embrace and silently shift in time to the music. The setting is a disorganised room, with scattered belongings, books and photographs. The atmosphere is compelling and mysterious, with very few clues as to what is about to take place. The next 45 minutes provided the single most exciting and emotive piece of theatre that I have seen at Cambridge all term.  

 I have lost myself, is an exploration of the world of memory, and how it fails. It centres on Augustus (Mauritz Spenke), who has a wealth deep and rich memories, but he is no longer able to access them. His dementia is played out, not through words, but through movement and physical interaction. He is surrounded by a chorus of unnamed lost souls, who act out parts of his life in so far as he can remember the details. They float around in a balletic torment, stealing the last glimpses he has of his past, mixing them into chaos and confusion. Their movements are fluid and stylised, ranging from graceful and beautiful, to aggressive and terrifying. Embodying the inner horror that Augustus is going through, they extract the thoughts from his mind, and project them to the audience with a captivating level of energy and ferocity.

Mauritz Spenke plays the ageing Augustus with power and sensitivity; the subtlety of his posture and facial expression bring to life a man who is trapped. His frustrations boil under the surface, and his restraint and interiority is highly moving. It is only when the chorus externalises his previous experiences that we see what he was like in his youth: full of romance, passion and joy. This last happiness is always tempered by the detachment and emotional distance of the chorus, played with utter concentration and focus by Anastasia Raymond, Uma Ramachandran, Stephanie Ashenden, and Oliver Jones. This tight and focused group move like the limbs of a single body, seamless shifting the roles of representing the younger Augustus, adding further to his lack of understanding of his own mind and his surroundings. 

Anna Moody plays the outsider: the one who knows him through all of his incarnations, and sees him change. She represents apparent normality, and has a fresh naturalistic style, unaware that she is caught within the confines of this man’s broken mind. Technically, the work relies on the split second timing of the lighting cues: with the movements and lights co-ordinated perfectly. We are thrown between darkness, silhouettes and shadows, with half-remembered photographs in tableau melting in and out of the action. Eimear Ryan-Charleton’s lighting design is the ideal addition to the disturbing and confusing mood.

Two aspects of the work make it an exceptional production: firstly, there is virtually no dialogue. There are many words: muttered, whispered, half-heard, but true dialogue only appears at the end when we see the effects of Augustus’ condition on his family. Everything else is unspoken, and told though movement and physicality. And second, this is a piece of new writing, by a Cambridge student. Jonathan Ben-Shaul is truly an auter: writing and directing the piece to bring his complex vision to life. The style is reminiscent of the French New Wave, with an honesty and introversion that smoulders from the start.

 Ben-Shaul has taken a deeply personal experience and conveys sadness and rage through this intelligent work of physical theatre. He is to be commended not just for presenting new writing, but for the bravery of his choice of subject matter. Along with Sian O’Brien’s choreography, the stylisation of the movement and interaction is professional and inventive; it is then delivered with confidence a very committed cast. Challenging and upsetting, I have lost myself represents the exciting edge of Cambridge theatre, and the courage to move the cast and its audiences out of the comfort zone.