Fringe Review: James Rowland – Team Viking
Touching and bittersweet, this story of a man honouring his best friend’s dying wish is a gentle reminder of life’s brevity.★★★★
When James Rowland’s best friend Tom was diagnosed with cancer, his last wish was to be given a Viking burial. Rowland obliged. That’s the premise of this gentle and affecting hour which is a masterclass in storytelling, and a testament to the enduring power of childhood friendships.
This is a reboot of a show that premiered in 2016 but it still feels like a fresh and, perhaps more remarkably, raw meditation on grief, on loss and the human spirit. Unflinching and clear-eyed, a ramshackle Rowland dissects his less-than-perfect behaviour around the time of Tom’s death, dropping sucker-punch after sucker-punch. But it’s also very funny.
“It’s all true,” he declares as the show ends, with a twinkle in his eye. It may or may not be, and actually that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it could be true; at heart, we’re all capable of setting light to our best friend’s body and pushing it off into a lake to burn just because we made a promise and because we are all capable of feeling great love, enormous loss and enduring loyalty, all at the same time. What beautiful beings us humans are when we’re at our best.
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Every syllable of Rowland’s tale celebrates this shared humanity: from sword fights in the garden to sunlit sessions in beer gardens, our beginnings, our endings and all the pieces in-between. This is a show for when you need to be reminded of that.
James Rowland – Team Viking is playing at the Courtyard of Curiosities at the State Library from February 20 – March 8
