Edith Piaf is a Liar

Posted by emptyphototheatre on April 24, 2013 · 2 Comments 

In his charmingly (and often painfully) accurate portrayal of student life, the novel Starter for Ten, David Nicholls makes an excellent point about regret; or rather, the protagonist does: “Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ – which is more often than I’d like, now that I’m at university – I can’t help thinking ‘what the hell is she talking about?’  I regret pretty much everything.”

Regret is a fundamental part of the human experience.  Anyone who tells you that they have no regrets is a) a liar and b) doing you a great disservice by encouraging you to believe that regret is not a universal sensation.  Of course it bloody is.  Regrets come in all shapes and sizes, and everybody has them.  During my university years, my regrets usually ran along the lines of wishing that I had remembered my umbrella, or that I had managed to scrape myself out of bed for that morning’s lecture.  I know people who have long-standing regrets about not telling the object of their affections how they felt, or failing to gain some kind of educational qualification.  A lot of people regret not going travelling, not breaking up with that bastard/bitch at the first sign of trouble, or not listening when their friends gently suggested that that particular clothing purchase might not be too flattering.

And there are darker, deeper regrets that you may only choose to share with one or two close friends, if you choose to share them at all.  Some parts of your history will always be a source of regret, and given that Marty McFly has thus far failed to convince us that time travel is possible, we all have to live with them.  But is that really such a bad thing?

Regret is like guilt, or fear, or anger: not ideal, but necessary.  Negative feelings and states of mind are motivators, and they are incontrovertibly powerful when it comes to changing who you are and how you go about living your life.  I don’t just mean that in a Road to Damascus-style sense, where the error of your ways suddenly hits you full in the face and you become an entirely different person: the low-level, gnawing feeling that you could have done things differently is arguably just as important.  How else do you assess yourself?  How else can you look at where you are and where you’ve been and work out what it is that needs to change?

You can only do that for your own behaviour, which is another difficult aspect of regret.  Learning from what you’ve done is mentally very healthy, but trying to make up for other people’s behaviour is the opposite.  For example (a painfully embarrassing thing to admit, this), a few years ago I was head-over-heels infatuated with a guy who really could not have cared less about me, but who enjoyed my slavering attention nonetheless.  It is easy to feel angry and regretful that he didn’t return my feelings, and that he felt the need to keep me hanging on for months on end, but actually what I should be regretting is that I really wore my heart on my sleeve and that I didn’t listen to my friends, who quite rightly told me to kick him to the proverbial kerb.

Like a teacher who can tell that you wrote your essay at 4am on deadline day, or a friend who tends to be just a tad too honest, regret is actually good for you, if a little tough to take.  It’s a big part of the dynamic in Chris is Dead, which is why it’s on my mind right now.  Three grieving friends who are trying to come to terms with their flatmate’s untimely death is a situation utterly steeped in regret.  I wish I hadn’t said this, I wish I’d told him that, I wish he’d done the washing up once in a while…their regrets and their attempts to process them are massively sabotaged by the fact that (spoiler alert) Chris is dead, and the lesson they have to learn is that, however hard it may be, they can only take responsibility for their own regrets and try to move on.  It’s difficult, and it’s painful, but it’s something that everybody has to do.  Although the play is mainly concerned with grief and its horrible practicalities (more on that later),  regret informs a huge part of the characters’ motivations.  If you come and see the play with the airy idea that you are one of those people who have no regrets, I hope that you might leave with the though that actually, you do, but that it’s not a bad thing.  The one great thing about regret is that you’re not alone.

Filed under Vicki · Tagged with anger, characters, Chris is Dead, Damascus, David Nicholls, drama, dynamic, Edith Piaf, essay, fear, friends, guilt, human experience, lecture, Marty McFly, motivation, Play, regret, repsonsibility, Starter for Ten, teacher, Theatre, time travel, umbrella, University