The Trio of Self: Writing a "Disconnected Trilogy"

In October of 2022, I performed my first ever piece of solo theatre as part of my Bachelor's Degree. If you had asked me at that time, I would not have told you that this piece would turn into a trilogy of self-explorative pieces. And yet, here we are two years later.

Each piece was debuted (save for the University performance of the first piece) at Chichester Fringe Festival, and as grateful as I was and continue to be to the fringe for the chance to showcase this work, the one year gap between each piece left me with a large problem: How do I connect these three pieces without alienating any new audience members that could come in the subsequent years?

The Trio of Self consists of three separate solo performances:

• The Art of Stress - A piece centred around my connection with, avoidance of and acceptance of stress.

• The Emergence of Us - A piece that focuses on how I view the person I was in the past and how I sometimes vilify them.

• The Fountain of Youth - A piece where I confront how I perceive my child self now that I am an adult.

If you were to experience the three in one sitting, their chronological release shows all of the connecting factors at play. The character I play in the first piece appears as a "past self" in The Emergence of Us. The second piece also introduces a dominating voice of self-doubt which I find myself channeling as a "grown-up" in The Fountain of Youth. Altogether, The Trio of Self sets out to tell my story of self-acceptance.

Writing a trilogy of self-reflective shows is hard, but writing them to be completely disconnected as to appeal to new audiences is much harder. There were times during the writing of the second and third pieces where I felt I was omitting material that I would have found very liberating and satisfying to incorporate for the sake of the audience having a good experience. This isn't to say that I feel the pieces came out worse for these omissions, but I do sometimes wonder what the series would have looked like if I had gone through with the original plan.

The series would have been laid out as six parts, each exploring what was hidden in the several boxes that appear as "Boxed Emotions" for my character in The Art of Stress. These emotions being Stress, Doubt, Heartbreak, Anger, Fear and Regret. The Emergence of Us was actually supposed to be entitled F*ck You, Ben Platt, and would feature me using the aforementioned artist's album, Sing To Me Instead, as a basis for working through the journey of a relationship. This dematerialized as, by the time I came to write it, enough time had passed that I no longer needed to. I had worked through those issues in my own.

This brings me to the "why" of these pieces. All in all, they all came from encountering roadblocks in my life. In my final year of University, stress held me back in a lot of ways, and hints of Anger coming in as its replacement were hinted at in the very first version of the ending (when the piece was still called Stress 101). I had a lot of issues when the second piece was written about confronting past actions and attitudes, and the third piece came about from being unable to watch videos of my younger self without some level of disdain. All of these are issues I still have to deal with, but the pieces all helped me confront them properly.

I think the reason why I found the disconnected nature of each performance so difficult is because all of them do feel interlinked with each other, and pretending that they weren't was a difficult thing to deal with as an artist. I would say you can watch them all and see the connections for yourself, but I was unable to record The Emergence of Us. Regardless, I imagine this is why traditional sequels and follow-ups are much more difficult in a theatrical space. But hey, at least I didn't charge people London theatre pieces to see a show that would make no sense without seeing the first part, that would be a ludicrous idea, right?

Photo Credit to Charles Allison