After All is ostensibly about death, but as with any reminder of life’s finitude, it is really about how to be alive. In her one-woman performance, Solène Weinachter fluidly expresses herself across the art forms through dance, music, theatre and poetry. But most of all, she is a story-teller with brilliant facial expressions to match.

Solène invites us in to her family through candidly sharing her experiences of her uncle’s funeral and her grandmother’s death. There is something innocently intimate about how she is so open. At times it feels like it is too much, but then, why do we always feel like we need to hold something back? Solène is radically vulnerable, for example, through her neediness when she shares her own difficulties around endings. But don’t let that make you think it is all serious; at times there is a bright and breezy jokiness to her performance which almost becomes silly. There are humorous shared cultural references, such as a very British understanding of the cringiness of a canned panpipe version of Frank Sinatra’s 'My Way'. During the Q & A afterwards, someone said that the performance had a Fleabag-like quality in the breaking down of the 4th wall, which I thought was very apt.

In fact, this is what will stay with me. Solène is really speaking directly to the audience and not in a performative way, but in a 'smile and shake your hand as you come into the auditorium' kind of a way. You can sense slight discomfort among the benches and there is something unpredictable about it - you feel like you don’t know what she might ask you to do. But actually there is no threat, and it says more about us that that is how we might feel. She forces us to engage with our shared humanity when so often, instead of looking each other in the eye, we are just staring at the floor. I think she also says something about how our society treats artists and our expectations of them. We are often just passive recipients of culture; we pay them (a meagre amount), lazily sit back and expect them to entertain (or at least distract) us.

This was why the Q & A session afterwards felt so valuable. It cemented that this was a show really about participation, in being alive and sharing that experience together. This is Solène’s 51st performance and it was fascinating to hear about the experience that she has gathered through performing this across the world and the way different cultures respond to death and grief. I for one will take the lessons I have learned from this performance in being a more active participant in cultural experiences, as well as in life.