Rehearsals for the Real World by Robin Lindsay Wilson

Leaf by Leaf (2020)

A Review by Shane Strachan

Inspired by reading Lydia Davis, Wilson got the idea that these 557 micro-monologues originally created for his drama students could work as a collection of flash fiction to be read and enjoyed. Like Davis’s best writing, Wilson’s most successful monologues are those that give the sense of a whole life existing beyond the snapshot we are presented. This is particularly the case when there is a focus on something or someone external to the speaker – such as a shipbuilder describing their handiwork with love and care – or a sharp evocation of the senses: a miner emerging into the light and fresh air; the memory of a stone being dropped from a bridge onto a passing car, the collision echoing through time. The monologues from animal perspectives are also particularly original in illuminating experiences far removed from our own, such as a grey heron weighing up its place in the animal kingdom.

However, one of the initial monologues sets the blueprint for many that miss the mark: ‘I could not hear myself think unless I exaggerated. […] No love of ordinary things.’ Too many are composed of pure abstract thought disconnected from a sense of real, lived experience and often shout from the page with an overkill of exclamations! In these, nuance and genuine surprise are often lacking, ending in epiphanies that become so spelt out and expected that they are forgettable, or we are force-fed a moral, rather than trusted to see it for ourselves: ‘I debased myself, came back round for another go! My choices just got smaller, yeh smaller… I became irrelevant and facile. Irrelevant to life. Real life. I wish these wishes would end’ bemoans a speaker later in the collection who tricks a genie into giving them endless wishes – all I could wish for by this point was that some last lines, and some entire monologues, had been edited out altogether.

In fairness, this is very much a criticism from the perspective of a reader, rather than that of an actor using Rehearsals as useful source texts to be pulled apart and brought to life in a myriad of ways. I might think very differently about some of these monologues if an actor imbued them with new meaning through a careful choice of tone, a pause or intonation by ‘actioning’ each line with their own interpretation of the narrator’s desires. Maybe the voice in my head just isn’t up to the acting job?

Others might commend the multitude of voices, perspectives, themes and topics – the everythingness of Wilson’s book – but I felt it didn’t hold my attention or pack the same sustained punch as the likes of Lucy Ellman’s all-encompassing, 1000-page behemoth Ducks, Newsburyport because the latter’s kaleidoscope of tangential, conflicting perspectives all belong to only one character’s unending monologue, who we come to know and care to listen to, unlike Wilson’s conveyor belt of voices. Ultimately, I can’t help but wonder if Rehearsals for the Real World could have been much more with much less.