Eric Lampaert: 'Amnesia felt like grieving not just my own death but the death of everyone I knew.'

After initially escaping hospital, he was diagnosed with confusion delirium, so severe he couldn't recognise his parents. He told his mum: “I understand that you're this body's mother. But as far as I'm concerned, Eric died.”

It took 18 months to recover a “fractured” semblance of who he'd been. But with Edinburgh in his diary, incredibly, he felt committed to his prophetically titled show Borne of Chaos.

“Which, obviously, proved to be one of the most alien and surreal experiences I've ever had. People were clearly worried because I was quite aloof and disconnected.” When fellow comic Laura Lexx asked why he didn't have any review quotes on his poster, he said, “well, those belong to someone else ...”

Born in France, Lampaert had a difficult, itinerant childhood, living in seven different countries by the time he was 12, until his horse racing family settled in Newmarket. A period of homelessness in his mid-teens followed his parents' divorce. And post-university from 2010 he became an Edinburgh fixture, “going on stage, striving for love”, a gangly, animated six footer, insecure about his striking looks, with a loosely autobiographical ITV sitcom, Jockeys, in the works.

He supported Suzy Eddie Izzard; appeared in Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and became a reality TV star in the francophone world with Mon Incroyable Fiancé, though in reality he'd married the American model Jordan Dwayne.

After moving to LA in 2016 however, his career stalled. He was distraught when his own marriage ended in divorce due to his infidelity, which he attributes to abandonment issues, and he started receiving hypnotherapy. He'd had cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety and depression but this was “transformative”.

From January to March 2019, he started actively rejecting his worst memories, felt euphoria and started seeing coincidences everywhere, “like there was order suddenly in the chaos” and he was anticipating or instigating events. Then on 19 March, his memory shut down completely.

He's still “baffled” by the experience but is finding transplanting it to the stage crucial, not just for piecing his life back together but saving it. His show, Zero Minus One, features an ongoing dialogue between himself as a patient and himself as a doctor, as well as a series of smaller roles, “my way of integrating my different selves”.

Appearing straitjacketed, he starts by saying he “can't quite tell the difference between artistic licence and mental illness”.

"That's because this was happening in Los Angeles, Hollywood, where they make movies, the capital of cinematic myth," he says. "And to me, in my state of non-reality, everything seemed possible. Storytelling helped because when I was on those low waves, when I was really struggling, honestly, sometimes it was so f***ing painful, the only thing that kept me alive was knowing that this is, indeed, a story. That identity is a story. That the character of Eric will rise and this is temporary.”

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He occasionally wonders if he's still in hospital or under hypnosis. But the once committed atheist now finds himself open to a broad spectrum of spirituality and science in his attempts to fathom “the void, the space where I didn't have identity and was just determination to survive”.

Having “died” once, the 40-year-old maintains he's no longer afraid of mortality. And he's “peaceful but lonely”, feeling himself “connected to something much bigger than myself” but only gradually “moving on, reintegrating into society, playing the role of being a human".

“Everyone strives for connection right? And everyone gets hurt by a break-up? Amnesia felt like grieving not just my own death but the death of everyone I knew.”

Despite everything, he's adamant that this is the best show he's ever written, subscribing to Søren Kierkegaard's maxim that “gold is purified in the fire”, and nowhere more so than in Edinburgh.

Besides, the “fearlessness” he's gained, which he'd imagined came at the expense of his ambition, hasn't stopped him working.

“Writing this was a way to not just show myself my transformation, but show my agent, show the comedy community that I'm back in a way that's better than before.”

Eric Lampaert, Zero Minus One, Just the Tonic at the Caves, 8.10pm, until 30 August

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