The COVID-related lockdown has been hard for many people for a number of reasons: not being able to work, spending the majority of one’s time indoors, deprivation of human contact. Nod At The Fox’s Breaking Up With Reality is an intimate take on coping with the here-and-now, and reconciling what’s not possible with what we want.

Written and performed by Eden Harbud, Breaking Up With Reality is both prosaic and ‘poetic’, comparing the departure of our ‘old way of life’ with the end of a relationship – except (to use fantastical plot twist) it isn’t with a human being, but a rabbit (à la Harvey / Alice In Wonderland).

Within the framework of the audio play, it all makes ‘perfect sense’, as the narrator analyzes what his life is like with the substitute reality that he now lives in (or rather ‘with’). On his bookshelf now resides a facsimile origami rabbit, left there by the mysterious ‘NN’ – the ‘New Normal’…

As the narrator/Harbud preoccupies hmself with the minutiae of everyday activities, he develops an awareness of how his energy levels and patterns of behaviour have changed over time. This awareness strengthens his perception, but what he wants now are things so elusive and ‘mundane’, they don’t even a name – the anticipation of the day ahead as one has the first cup of coffee, the tiredness from a productive day…

Harbud articulates a lot of within the play’s brief duration, but if Breaking Up With Reality is a microcosm, a solipsistic take on making peace with the present status quo, it does so with deftness and sensitivity.

© Michael Davis 2021

The audio play Breaking Up With Reality is Nod At The Fox’s contribution to The Living Record Festival online and can be listened to until 22nd February. Tickets can be purchased at: https://live-stream.zarucchi.com/entities/nod-at-the-fox/feed