Theatre / Live Podcast
Review: Jon Ronson – Things Fell Apart: Live, Tobacco Factory Theatres
Jon Ronson opens a packed Tobacco Factory by reprising a winning series of exchanges with his son at eight years old (now in his 20s), demanding to know the worst swear word in the world.
It sets the tone for what follows. Ronson’s natural charm and humour, combined with his characteristic soothing cadence and easy style has the audience enthralled for the entirety of Things Fell Apart: Live, a tour of his award-winning podcast series about the onset of the culture wars.
Ronson cites Leonard Cohen’s evocative song The Future, which has played out to the audience in the few minutes before the show, with its telling lyrics “Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions / Won’t be nothing (won’t be) / Nothing you can measure anymore”.
is needed now More than ever
And this is the creative preoccupation woven through the stories that Things Fell Apart explores.
From a personal perspective, the impetus for the series was that previously held certainties were being lost; an erstwhile friendship with Graham Linehan was dissolved as a once familiar person showed themselves up to be utterly different from the one Ronson thought he knew.
“But we all have our Graham’s,” he points out. Deftly weaving together an opening hour of chat, readings, images, video and sound clips, he touches on a few of the many characters he explores in much more depth in the podcast, as well as the well-known story of Justine Sacco’s ill-fated tweet at the heart of his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.
Yet rather than disconnection, at the core of this show, is in fact a story of a culture war being ended. It is a startling coming together, rather than a falling apart – in the emotional 1985 interview between televangelist Tammy Faye, and Steve Pieters, the gay pastor with AIDS.
40 years on, and the ebullient Pieters is the longest surviving person with AIDS, a man who just last week was Jessica Chastain’s date to the Oscars lunch, following her Academy Award win for The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
In a beautiful and heartwarming second half, Pieters joins Ronson via zoom and the waves of admiration and awe are felt around the Tobacco Factory as he explains why the interview with Faye reverberated around the world in the way that it did.
“I decided to come to it with love,” he recalls, “and so, it seemed to me, did she”.
It’s an astonishing climatic point to a very successful ‘live’ iteration of the fascinating series of long-form stories that comprise Things Fell Apart.
For a self-confessed “writer who spends 90 per cent of his time alone in a room worrying,” Ronson certainly knows how to lift the gloom when he enters a full house.
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Jon Ronson: Things Fell Apart LIVE is at Tobacco Factory Theatres on April 1-2 at 8pm. Tickets are available at www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com. The show then tours to Nottingham, Sheffield and Cardiff.
Main photo: Emli Bendixen
Read more: Interview: Jon Ronson on ‘Psychopath Night’
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