Photo credit: Douglas Jones

Photo credit: Douglas Jones

Photo credit: Douglas Jones

What Remains

Anatomy Department, University of Edinburgh

2011

A collaboration with David Paul Jones, based on a short story by Ben Harrison, a solo installation work performed by DPJ examining a disturbed pianist who has a manic and obsessive relationship with his pupils and his piano. Performed in the anatomy department of the Medical School of Edinburgh, as part of the Traverse Festival programme.

Neil Cooper, The Herald

Part installation, part psycho-killer case study, deliciously delivered.

Ed McCracken, Fest Magazine

I dark and dream-like. . .Jones plays a complex, beautiful piece on the grand piano. It leaves musical clues of what awaits and nursery rhyme idyll is interrupted by terrifying dissonance…As the macabre ratchets up, What Remains explores the idea that music can create madness as well as joy. But this is not a slasher horror. There is nothing that goes bump in the night. Rather it creeps under the skin by pulling gauze over the audience’s eyes alongside weird piano lessons and ringing phones…great use of the medical school’s eerie spaces, dark corridors and Gothic skeletons, combined with a chilling soundtrack, What Remains certainly stays with you.

Dorothy Max Prior, Total Theatre Magazine

I’ve been watching, and listening to, David Paul Jones admiringly for many years, ever since his appearance in Grid Iron’s Those Eyes, That Mouth (2003). .. DPJ and Grid Iron’s director Ben Harrison have been conspiring to create this present work ever since they met. . .it may have been a long time coming, but it’s great that it’s finally happened. . . the physical, visual, musical score lovingly guided and directed by Ben Harrison. It’s a melee of marvellous sounds and – yes – haunting images; a wonderful marriage of sight and sound – and indeed of site and sound! There’s beauty in the darkness, and humour too. It’s a show that will remain with me a long time, I’m sure.