“Love outlasts everything. Except grief of course, but that’s different.” On a darkened stage beneath the Pleasance Courtyard, a small, intimate audience ducked out of the rain, awaiting Paul Sellar, whose debut poetry performance was about to follow passages of his life in an intimate montage of love, loss and living.
Across a Love Locked Bridge crosses many bridges, really. Sellar moves from reflections on youth and adolescence across growing up. From tossing stones in his mother’s native Ireland, to young adulthood in a wild London of smudged eyeliner and Camden bars. To a tumultuous relationship, rising, like those childhood stones thrown high, and then falling down towards the sea, becoming driftwood to cling to, and eventually float away from.
Sellar’s nature is warm, and his intermittent commentary matches his verse so well sometimes its hard to know which is which. This connection crucially provides a capacity for vulnerability as, poem by poem, his life falls open on our laps like a roll of faded film.
Across a Loved Locked Bridge is Sellar’s final poem. This tangible bridge in rural Bavaria was weighed down by the insurmountable heaviness of ‘love locked.’. Eventually local government stepped in, and the locks – old, faded, and rotting – were cut away. The bridge rises, stables and, as Sellar says with a gentle smile, is ready to begin again. Such traversing of childhood games and teenage love affairs to mid-life AA meetings, packed-up flats and empty spirit bottles should feel bitterly anticlimactic; more prose than poetry. But Sellar’s soft-spoken reflections don’t initiate pity. Around me the audience stirs; their laughter twinged with nostalgia, wry smiles at the acknowledgement of the universality of having your heart broken at specifically seventeen and the gradual, yet certain, realisation that you’ve washed up on a shore of life which wasn’t where you thought you’d find yourself.
Long after the show these same people sit, and perhaps minds turn inwards, from the empty stage to personal theatres of lives, loves and bridges. All crossed on a grey Edinburgh morning in the rain.
Across a Love Locked Bridge is on in Pleasance Beneath at 10:55 until 25 August
Buy tickets here.
Image via Pleasance Press Office