To Move in Time by Tim Etchells The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Broad Street, Birmingham B1 2EP 23 May 2024.

4✩✩✩✩ Review: Joanna Jarvis.

“A speculative and reflective journey.”

If you could travel in time, would you go back to prevent small mishaps such as the loss of a wallet or an accident with a car? Would you try to prevent great catastrophes or move forward for information in order to make money? Tim Etchells’ piece muses on time and our relationship with it, as there would be infinite ways to use such a super-power.

Tyrone Huggins, standing alone, centre stage and barely moving from one spot uses his melodious voice to tease out these possibilities. His use of silence and pauses, of intonation and pitch is excellent. He keeps our attention for the whole monologue with his beautifully modulated voice. His repetition of the phrase ‘if I could travel in time’ is at first gentle and speculative, sometimes forceful, always different and matched to each new thought.

This is a journey through a thought process, reflective and provoking. Going back in time to change something or prevent something happening would change the future. Would it be better to conjure another super-power?

In a recent interview Etchells stated that he uses language to ‘open thoughts, questions, stories and ideas in the viewer’. He certainly does that in this piece. What begins as an amusing riff on the funny things that might happen, moves through more sombre musings to a final consideration of what is important to us as humans. This is a moving and thought-provoking piece of writing, beautifully rendered by Huggins.

Performer and creatives

Tim Etchells – Writer & Director 

Tyrone Huggins – Performer & Collaborator

Hester Chillingworth – Assistant Director

Jim Harrison – Lighting Design & Production Management

Eileen Evans – Producer