Misirlou explores death: understanding it, accepting it and cheating it. It’s a dark and meaningful topic that has me expecting a philosophical and stimulating evening; one that The Diva Philosopher (Themis Helen) is adamant her audience should experience. However, after seeing the woman who would be performing the lecture for the first time, my assumptions were well and truly challenged.

A woman enters a stage riding a cardboard horse, wearing a faux polar bear on her shoulders, and has a face covered in gold glitter. No, this is not the beginning of a joke that you would anticipate hearing down your local, although Misirlou does take place above a pub, but it is in fact the beginning of a very interesting 60 minutes.

Misirlou is a one woman improvisational piece, and although accompanied by a lighting and sound technician, The Diva Philosopher is well and truly a solo act as she unashamedly criticised the efforts on display. The Diva Philosopher describes herself as half Greek and half superhero, but in order to understand the performance the audience needs to know the woman behind the act. I was fortunate enough to meet Helen after the show and decided to use this opportunity to pick her brains, intrigued by her thought processes and intentions.

Being an improvisational piece, there is only one through-line topic, death. The Diva Philosopher initiates conversation and literally feeds off of the audience’s reaction. This is a risky form of theatre as the direction the performance takes is unpredictable with its success solely dependent on the level of audience participation. The inclusion of the audience begins instantly as The Diva Philosopher sporadically throws glitter across the stage and encourages dancing, a routine that pays homage to Tina Turner circa Rolling Down the River. Witnessing this fun, free spirit about to embark on an explanation of such a morbid topic as death was hard to believe, but even harder to believe was the fact that I fell for it.

Because every performance of Misirlou is different to the last, I can only comment on what transpired this evening. The audience was intimate and fortunately willing to participate to a certain degree; the apprehension to fully commit probably stemmed from the fact that they did not quite know what was going on. As an ensemble we sang, danced, formed a circled on stage and even had one-on-one conversations with The Diva Philosopher when we felt comfortable and brave enough. Conversations about being at peace with death were heavily mixed with dalliances around the stage and impromptu costume changes (all of which featured a noticeable increase in glitter). An adaptation of Schrodinger’s Cat experiment in which The Diva Philosopher transforms into a cat and awaits her fate is alternative, but is the core message for the performance. The Diva Philosopher wants the audience to question the difference between being dead and being alive, not to stimulate debate, but to highlight the ways in which education is being delivered and taught in the system. Whilst my understanding of Misirlou is based upon that fact that I spoke with Helen, our conversation post-show has given me great insight into understanding the method behind the madness.

Misirlou will work as an improvisational piece only if you are prepared to work. During our conversation Helen intended on showing how fun teaching can be. The performance was certainly fun, but this can only be achieved if you suspend disbelief. Willing to forget the conventional script, definitive structure, and cohesive script, I successfully engaged with Helen whose performance certainly brought a bit of life to the topic of death.

Misirlou played at the Etcetera Theatre on January 17.