Word-Play at the Royal Court

[imstillhere]

Has anyone seen this yet? I'm planning on going this weekend hopefully.

[foxa]

I caught this last night. It's a series of short scenes all with the uniting theme of words, with a particular emphasis on their social and cultural implications. The strongest scene, I thought, was the first when after the PM uses an inflammatory phrase, a group of advisors gather to discuss how to deal with it, exposing the inadequacies of their own language (even to the point of looking up synonyms for 'sorry.') This scenario is returned to, while the rest of the scenes are standalone - some very short, some more extended. Some refer directly to having a relationship with language other than English - a woman apologises for using a phrase from her mother tongue in a meeting, a wife is furious at her husband's co-opting and corruption of her mother's family recipe. There are less interesting scenes looking in a very familiar way at the language of social media/text.

All of the actors are very good. Sirine Saba brings warmth and variety to her characters who are often motored by a simmering rage. Kosar Ali is funny as the assistant who really wants to take notes.

It's one hour twenty played with no interval.

It's not boring (though one person did walk out about 2/3s of the way through), but it also doesn't feel like a play.The scene chosen to finish the piece was powerful, but it didn't land like a natural ending. Some scenes were no more than skits and due to the shortness of the scenes, it was rare for there to be more than one three-dimensional character onstage - and sometimes not even that.

So ultimately not a terrible evening at all, but a frustrating one.

[showgirl]

And I've just seen the matinee. It was an interesting experiment but imo ultimately disappointing as although there was a unifying theme, the individual scenes were too disjointed to combine to create a satisfying whole; in some the dialogue was pointlessly repetitive, though in others the repetition did seem gradually to add to the effect. Much of the time I felt content was sacrificed for form. In fairness I wasn't expecting a play and though it didn't live up to my hopes, a couple of the female cast members were very impressive but give me a production like "Cuckoo" every time rather than this, which was bound to suffer in comparison.

[Oobi]

This was very disappointing for me, the saddest thing being that for a show entitled "Word-play", there really isn't much wordplay. The prose often amounts to simply reciting long lists of synonyms.

Plays about xenophobia are obviously going to be one-sided, but this play is one-sided in such a boring way. Almost every sketch features a "writer self-insert" character who exists to sermonize to the audience, with no room for nuance or interpretation or complexity.

Take the "Completely detached house" scene, for example. It's about a dinner party that devolves into a political argument, with the white husband spouting xenophobic rhetoric in front of his ethnic minority wife, who keeps asking for the salt. Then the wife blows up and screams for thirty seconds about how salt is a metaphor for her cultural identity. Like, yes, thank you, I was enjoying the dialogue until you felt the need to explain it in painstaking detail!

Interesting ideas are often overlooked or ignored. For example, the "Morning after" scene presents a minority woman who, after a one-night stand, is challenged by her "non-practicing" partner to explain why she sees him as less of a minority. There's a fascinating linguistic question here: why is it that Jews and still called Jews when they don't practice, but Christians aren't called Christians when they don't practice? Given that we don't even know the religious identity of these characters (it's left ambiguous), the question is ripe for exploration. But instead of posing the question, the woman is simply framed as dishonest and poorly-motivated, hence absolving the writer of any responsibility to meaningfully refute her views.

Other times, the implications don't really make any sense. The segment that begins the show, entitled "Then", is a conversation between two men as they develop Enoch Powell's famous "rivers of blood" phrase. Later on, towards the end of the show, the segment "Then Again" features seemingly the same two men conceptualizing the word "Brexit", obviously drawing a parallel. But, like... seriously? "Rivers of blood" and "Brexit", as terms, are absolutely nothing like one another. The former is an evocative xenophobic metaphor, conceived as such. The latter is just a punny noun that refers to a political movement, conceived by broad popular consensus.

There were some bright spots. In a play where it was almost always obvious what the writer was trying to say, I loved the "Therapy" sketch for the simple reason that it intrigued me. I also liked "Outside"; it was simple but evocative, and the actor's performance was easily the best of the evening.

3/10. I've seen more interesting deconstructions of populist language in Youtube video essays.