Pacey, powerful, and heartbreakingly authentic, Today I Killed My Very First Bird explores hope and despair, combining immersive sound and bold storytelling to create a vivid and visceral theatrical experience. Theatre Royal Plymouth and Voodoo Monkeys co-produce an unflinching, relentless and stomach-churning new play based on writer and performer Jason Brownlee’s lived experience.
A Southeast London gangster starts to lose his grip on reality when he’s forced to look back at the traumatic childhood that made him who he is. The more he remembers, the more brutal he becomes. But, just when he’s offered a second chance, it might all be too late.
Today I Killed My Very First Bird is a brutal and poetic story of crime, addiction and redemption. Performed by Brownlee, along with four other cast members, almost entirely seated, the production uses his unique authentic voice to create a potent, dramatic world. Pivoting from extreme representations of poverty to deeply spiritual explorations of what it means to truly recover and escape the legacy that has been pre-determined for you, the lived experience cries out through Brownlee’s writing.
With an innovative plot full of twists, Today I Killed My Very First Bird is inventive and fresh and bears unflinching witness to the world it represents, based on Brownlee’s own childhood, trauma, spiritual experiences and recovery.
Director Lee Hart and Brownlee first met in 2015 at Project X, a weekly theatre making workshop at Theatre Royal Plymouth, facilitated by Hart. Lee Hart comments, TIKMVFB has a power and urgency that can only come from the deep well of lived experience. The writing is brutal and honest – a rhyming song of violence, trauma, healing, and redemption, carrying with it the collected ancestral suffering of its central character and those around him. It feels like now, more than ever, we need to listen to the storytellers who have returned from the darkest depths of their lives with the urgency and insight that only a symbolic death and rebirth can bring.
