Unravelling a Living Memory

“It's the people you lose who make you who you are. Bob Karper makes this explicitly clear in what looks like the most simple, honest and beautiful piece of musical story-telling theatre in town.

With only lo-fi slides, home video footage of his high-school reunion and old school electric keyboards to back him up, Karper calmly relates a tale of how he and his two high-school buddies gradually drifted apart as he left small-town America to teach in Japan. On his return, the once inseparable geek-boy fraternity have each opened themselves up to different experiences and can no longer relate.

Somewhere in there, too, is footage of a live art piece in which Karper and his ex-girlfriend read out their letters to each other, written over the previous seven years. Then there's the third Steve, who Karper met at a show, and who told him his story about how lives change, friends fall out and even though they drift apart, still possess a sliver of the old bonds that bound them as they're somehow reconciled.

If all this sounds like some self-indulgent, me-generation confessional or else a paean to Friends Reunited, think again. Because, in this follow-up to the equally lovely That's Me on the Left in the Parka, which played Edinburgh a few years back, Karper seems to be gradually unravelling a living memoir in which he quietly records not just the colour of memory, but the sounds and places, too. Unlike some other, more demonstrative auto-biographical shows, Karper isn't presenting himself as perfect. Instead, as the music and images counterpoint his all-American narrative, an understated meat and two veg Zen wisdom shines through.

Those of a certain age will relate to this story immediately, and no-one should miss it. It might even make you want to make a call to someone you've not seen in years.”

★★★★

— Neil Cooper, Glasgow Herald