Former Children’s Laureate and Pen Pinter Award winner, performer, broadcaster, author and scriptwriter, Michael Rosen brings his new one-person show, Getting Through It, to Lighthouse on Friday 21 March. Here, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster Ian McMillan talks to him about how he got through the events he recounts in the show…
I’m on Facetime about to talk to Michael Rosen, poet, performer, former Children’s Laureate, genuine National Treasure and survivor, about his new tour. Before we start, I apologise for the fact that I’m in the corner of the screen like a stamp on a letter and he launches into a riff about stamps and letters and schoolyard jokes about stamps being licked at the back before they travel all over the world and I think to myself that, as ever with Michael Rosen, language is in very safe hands.
His new one-man show is called Getting Through It and it’s a show about grief and mortality and resilience. ‘Yes,’ he says, musing about the target audience, ‘it’s not really a family show full of laughs, although I guess older children can come along with their parents and I guess I wouldn’t exclude anybody really.’
Of course he wouldn’t: inclusivity has always been his superpower.
There are two halves to Getting Through It; in the first half Michael reads poems about the death, a number of years ago, of his stepson Eddie at the age of 18 from meningitis. The second half is all about Michael’s experience with Covid, of his 42 days in a coma, and of his eventual glorious recovery. And the link between before and after the interval is that thing I mentioned earlier: language, and how he uses it to tell us his story and the stories of the people who cared for him and the story of how it can help us to shape our own experiences into narrative and somehow learn from them.
There were times when language almost failed him, though: ‘When Eddie died’ he says, his voice strong with emotion, ‘I felt that I had no voice. I couldn’t write anything and I was in a kind of miasma of thought but I couldn’t get anything down.’ There were times when he felt that this might last forever, but then, miraculously, it was a poem that unlocked the poetry in him again. ‘I read a poem by the great American writer Raymond Carver and it was just a simple poem about locking yourself out and getting back in the house, and it unlocked something in me. I was able to write, fragments at first, but then poems and things that I felt able to share with people.’
The Carver poem is simple and heartfelt and at one point he writes ‘If this sounds like the story of a life, okay.’
In the second half Michael talks about his terrifying descent into a coma as a result of Covid, his gradual recovery and the message he wants to give about the power of the NHS and the redemptive power of love.
They were scary times, and as he says, once he came out of the coma he kept forgetting that he’d been in one and there was the overwhelming fear that he might forget how to write. ‘I’d say to my wife ‘How long was I in that coma?’ and she’d say ‘42 days’ and I’d nod and say all right then and then a little while later I’d ask her again and she’d tell me, patiently, that it was 42 days. My brain was scrambled, completely scrambled.’
But then, as before, language began to return. This time it wasn’t a poem that unlocked the word-door, but simply being around people and listening to them and noticing them and the world. ‘I became full of desperation to write things and I’d write down fragments of language and the right details will float to the surface.’ He talks about when the doctors and nurses kept coming to his bedside in hospital and he’d ask them how he was and they’d say ‘You’ve been very poorly’ and, as he says ‘I think if somebody’s very poorly then they’ve got a cold or a runny nose. They haven’t nearly died. But they kept saying ‘You’ve been very poorly’ and so I wrote a poem with that as a repeating line. You’ve been very poorly.’
Eventually when he could get out of bed, and he could write little ‘unfolding’ (his word) pieces of poetry he wondered if he’d ever be able to walk properly again, and then whether he’d ever be able to stand up and perform his poetry in front of 800 children and their parents. He was taken to a gym for rehab and explained his fears about never being able to perform again to the physio. ‘You can’t say that’ she replied.
And then, wonderfully, a few months later he was doing a show for a huge audience at the Royal Festival Hall and he was meeting the children afterwards to sign books and, as he says ‘We still had to sit behind a Perspex screen and I looked up and a woman said ‘Do you remember me?’ and of course it was the physiotherapist, and she was right. You should never say you can’t do something.’
And as Raymond Carver wrote ‘If this sounds like the story of a life, okay.’