Paterson makes solo theatre look like the only form this story was ever meant for
Memory arrives in boxes, in fragments, in the cadences of people no longer here. NIUSIA, Beth Paterson’s solo show about her late grandmother, a Polish Holocaust survivor, takes this literally. The space is already lived in before anyone takes their seat: a table buried under books and cardboard boxes stacked as though someone ran out of room. An ornate armchair sits in the middle of it all, comfortable and slightly out of place. From the moment the doors open, the audience is less spectator than uninvited guest at someone else’s reckoning.
What Paterson has constructed is less a theatre show than an act of archaeological recovery and the device that drives it earns its place completely. Running beneath the performance like a second heartbeat are recorded conversations between Paterson and her psychologist mother, Susie, the two of them working through the family’s silences together. The voiceover roots everything in the specific texture of real memory, not reconstructed or dramatised, but happening in real time across generations. When Paterson steps into a scene that her mother’s voice has just excavated, we are watching a woman learn who she comes from. And it is a matriarchal endeavour as grandmother, mother, granddaughter pulling at the same thread from different ends of time.
With a single costume, Paterson’s transformations happen through body: a shift in the set of her jaw, a hardening behind the eyes, and suddenly Niusia is in the room, emerging as formidable and sharp-tongued. Paterson’s gift is in refusing to sand her down into a saintly figure, as Niusia could be difficult. Young Beth was bribed with hot chocolate to visit. That tension built on love that contains resentment, admiration that arrives decades late, is where the show lives.
Running alongside Niusia’s biography it is a quieter story about what we find when we go looking for where we come from and what it means to finally recognise yourself in someone you don’t know much about. Paterson’s interrogation of her own Jewish identity gives the show a second pulse. Family history turns out to be less an archive than a mirror.
The books become the production’s most resonant image. Paterson hurls them across the stage at one point, the thuds landing like something physical and necessary; later, she repacks them, slow and methodical, the violence and the restoration contained in the same gesture. When she reads aloud their titles, pulling them from boxes one by one, it becomes a quiet way of piecing together a person from the outside in.
Humour arrives without apology, and when it works it really works: reframing grief rather than escaping it or landing a punchline that somehow doubles as tribute. However, there are moments that feel closer to a standup aside than something integral, loosening the tension without quite knowing what to do with it and can occasionally pull attention away from the grandmother, who remains the most compelling presence in the room even when she isn’t in it.
These are minor fractures in something otherwise remarkably whole. NIUSIA is the kind of theatre that makes the medium feel irreplaceable and the only form that could hold this story in quite this way. Paterson’s final image lingers: history, repacked into boxes, but changed by having been opened.
Niusia runs until Saturday 23rd May at Theatre503, London.