Bodies

[Deleted]

I was worried

As the subject matter is rather self indulgent

Don't worry

Quite quite spectacular

Possibly the best new play I have seen for several years

Justine Mitchell

Is simply astonishing

The play covers so many elements and subjects in a relatively short running time

It takes a complex and emotive issue of surrogacy

And turns it on its head

One of the best new plays I have ever seen at RC

Full stop

And have seen everything there for best part of last 15 years

Some of the scenes are so well acted and written my heart was pounding and I held my breath

See it for Justine Mitchell

It makes a good companion piece to Yerma

[showgirl]

Glad you enjoyed it, Parsley, though I'm not sure whether that's an indication that others will. Sounds as though the territory it explores is similar to that of "Made In India" which had a brief tour earlier this year and which I saw when it reached Soho Theatre. Seeing this soon so shall return to post my view afterwards. I hope that for me it will represent a return to form for the writer as after liking the first play of hers I saw, I loathed Pests.

[Deleted]

Jul 8, 2017 4:43:39 GMT showgirl said:

Glad you enjoyed it, Parsley, though I'm not sure whether that's an indication that others will. Sounds as though the territory it explores is similar to that of "Made In India" which had a brief tour earlier this year and which I saw when it reached Soho Theatre. Seeing this soon so shall return to post my view afterwards. I hope that for me it will represent a return to form for the writer as after liking the first play of hers I saw, I loathed Pests.

It's quite superior to

Made in India

In every way shape
And form

[showgirl]

I see. So I wonder which of the two will prove, for me, to be the more entertaining and engaging? I may be insufficiently discerning to appreciate in full the merits of the superior version!

[showgirl]

Off-topic (apols), but at least Parsley is still with us, unlike another of our alumni.

[Deleted]

Jul 8, 2017 11:02:25 GMT @theatremonkey said:

Jul 7, 2017 23:01:48 GMT @parsley said:

Possibly the best new play I have seen for several years

Who are you, and what have you done to Parsley? We demand to know.

Do see it

I am still thinking about it

It would make an excellent TV programme

One of those 2 part things

[Latecomer]

Booked. If it's good enough for Parsley it's good enough for me!

[Deleted]

Jul 8, 2017 15:25:17 GMT Latecomer said:

Booked. If it's good enough for Parsley it's good enough for me!

The performance Justine Mitchell gives

For me was on a par with

Denise Gough

And Billie Piper

Perhaps even better as the writing is more interesting here

I hope you also find it as rewarding as I did

The upstairs theatre really can be a miracle sometimes

People queuing to see rubbish like Harry Potter

And things like this gem playing to less than 100 per night

[Deleted]

Tonight cancelled I hear

[Lopsided]

I too, on the strength of Parsley's praise, have booked for this next Saturday.
Really loved The Witness and Pests, but hated her take on The Snow Queen at Bristol this past Christmas - I did a Parsley and scarpered at the interval for that one.
Looking forward to this, though. Fingers crossed cancellation not anything too serious.
Thanks for the recommendation.

[chameleon]

Parsley - did you like 'The Witness' and/or 'Pests'?

Jul 7, 2017 23:01:48 GMT @parsley said:

I was worried

As the subject matter is rather self indulgent

Don't worry

Quite quite spectacular

Possibly the best new play I have seen for several years

Justine Mitchell

Is simply astonishing

The play covers so many elements and subjects in a relatively short running time

It takes a complex and emotive issue of surrogacy

And turns it on its head

One of the best new plays I have ever seen at RC

Full stop

And have seen everything there for best part of last 15 years

Some of the scenes are so well acted and written my heart was pounding and I held my breath

See it for Justine Mitchell

It makes a good companion piece to Yerma

[samuelwhiskers]

Jul 8, 2017 16:59:32 GMT @parsley said:

Tonight cancelled I hear

Cast member in hospital.

[showgirl]

Crumbs, that sounds more serious than the usual "indisposed" - hope s/he is OK.

[schuttep]

After Parsley's paean I, too, have booked.

The Royal Court may well be puzzled by this sudden spike in bookings!

[samuelwhiskers]

Brian Ferguson is out (no word on how long) so another actor stepped in script in hand.

[showgirl]

Approximate running time, please, those who have seen it? Going soon but still no info on Royal Court site. Thank you.

[samuelwhiskers]

I can't remember exactly but something like an hour 40 straight through.

[showgirl]

ThanK you very much - seem once again to have ended up with a short matinee & possibly a long evening performance.

[lonlad]

Jonathan McGuinness on for Brian Ferguson at tonight's press night

[cljf2]

Jul 11, 2017 10:42:10 GMT samuelwhiskers said:

I can't remember exactly but something like an hour 40 straight through.

Have you seen it Samuelwhiskers? If so do you concur with Parsley?

[samuelwhiskers]

I'm quite conflicted. There was an inherent issue at the heart of the play and I couldn't decide how to feel about it.

Franzmann is evidently a rare talent and she's so aware of and so good at sensitive racial politics. My initial response was to find it problematic but knowing what I know of the writer I'm not sure if I'm interpreting it correctly. It's similar to Yerma, but what saved Yerma was the narrowness of its forcus. It was solely about a woman and her mental disintegration due to not having a baby and didn't try to be about a larger political issue. Bodies was promoted as being a play about surrogacy and the racial politics of wealthy white women buying the bodies and bodily services of impoverished women from developing countries. Granted there are powerful moments about those aspects. But

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}But the audience basically never sees the surrogate apart from in the fantasies and hallucinations of the woman receiving the baby (Clem), nor do we really learn what happens to the surrogate. As the play progresses it becomes more and more about Clem and her mental state till nothing else exists.

Franzmann was quoted as saying it was a play about what happens when your body betrays you. You could remove all the Indian surrogacy stuff completely and be left with a fantastic piece about the relationship between an infertile woman and her imaginary 'perfect' daughter.

I kept going back and forth trying to decide whether:
a) The play is about a woman who has a mental breakdown because she can't birth a baby, and the surrogate stuff is just window dressing.
b) The play is about Indian surrogacy but shown through the perspective of a wealthy white woman for a specific reason.
c) The play is about both the trauma of infertility and miscarriage, and the commodification and exploitation of WOC bodies, and the two make uneasy bedfellows.

Whatever the intention, I don't need to see another film/play/TV show where an exploited minority acts a plot device to tell the story of a privileged white character's suffering and personal growth. I found Clem quite unsympathetic, which makes her interesting as a character, but when she hallucinates that the surrogate has cut her feet running away (from the apparently Pomona-lite gestation chamber) because her own children are alone, it's hard to take that as anything more than Clem's own white guilt and infertility-inspired mental distress. Maybe the surrogate does suffer as badly as she imagines? Who knows? It's just odd to have a play about Indian surrogacy without showing the point of view of an Indian surrogate.

[Steve]

An issues play that tries hard to balance it's agenda with compassion for the characters, and fails, because the fix is so obviously in.

I do love Vivienne Franzmann, but of the four plays I've seen by her, I liked this the least.

"Mogadishu," I loved. Perhaps because she herself was a teacher, and lived and breathed the milieu, Franzmann constructed a "Children's Hour" type narrative, about a false accusation by a pupil against a teacher, that was not only dramatically enthralling, but also compassionately discovered the complex and confusing humanity behind the motivations of every character.

"Pests" I liked almost as much, but for a different reason. Franzmann constructed a unique language for her characters that perfectly reflected their isolated and marginalised world, an experimental choice that worked so well, the Royal Court production left an indelible imprint on me.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Franzmann's willingness to be experimental results in the most rewarding plot point in "Bodies," that one of the characters is not real, but the fantasy projection of another character. This fantasy character, established as such in the first ten minutes, becomes a conduit and a focus, a prism reflecting all the hope, love, need, despair of all the other characters. A brilliant idea that works brilliantly.

Also intriguing are the different ways Franzmann looks at "bodies," how they fail, and how those-whose-bodies-work can aid those-whose-bodies-fail. Justine Mitchell and Philip Goldacre are both terrific as characters whose bodies fail them, Mitchell's Clem unable to conceive, and Goldacre's David (Clem's father) unable even to feed himself. The mirroring of the father's and daughter's plights offers much useful food for thought.

Unfortunately, like a hungry shark, Franzmann then allows the issues of her issues-play to devour the complexity of her characters, till there's nothing left but the bloody entrails of liberal guilt. . .

SPOILER: Click to show

Everything about third-world surrogate, Salma Hoque's Lakshmi, is botched in Franzmann's desire to get to the moment she spits at the Royal Court audience. The concept of her spitting on us is great, in and of itself, but to get there, Franzmann must contort the plot. She invents circumstances where terrible things must happen to the surrogate's own children in order for her to be a surrogate at all. This is ridiculous, and a sign that the fix is in. Further, as Samuelwhiskers points out, by not characterising Lakshmi herself at all, Franzmann neglects her character even more than Clem does. And then, to compound the problem, Franzmann is faithless to Clem herself, having her make statements entirely out of character to make her seem more feckless and more deserving of being a human spittoon.

Justine Mitchell is typically great as the Yerma-desperate Clem, Jonathan McGuinness endearing as her supportive husband (he seems to have the role fulltime now, on the Royal Court site). So too does Hannah Rae make a wonderful stage debut as Clem's daughter, empathetic and mercurial, and Lorna Brown offer gravitas and humour as Clem's father's carer. But it is Philip Goldacre, as Clem's father, David, whose performance I will most treasure, his juddering movements and slurred speech suggesting bodily degeneration, while his playful humour and eagle eyes suggest a diamond sharp mind.

All in all, this is an issues play that eats itself, and it's a shame, as Franzmann's ability to think round issues, as well as her experimental and innovative ways of presenting them, are generally terrific.

3 stars.

[showgirl]

My view is somewhere in between Parsley's rave and Steve's reservations: for me this is probably as good as Mogadishu and Witness and vastly better than the ghastly Pests, but I don't agree that its treatment of the surrogacy issue was superior to that of Made In India (both covered the hidden impact on the surrogate and the effect of critical legislative change) and for me, Vivienne Franzmann has diminished her own work here by being implausibly schematic - and melodramatic. I've said this before about other plays but this is already a contentious subject about which people have very strong feelings, so why overdo it? However, for its treatment of infertility I much preferred this to the one-note Yerma, and the acting was impressive all round. So had I to rate it, I'd award 5 stars for the performances (and the set design!) but only 3 for the writing.

[theatre-turtle]

I always get home too late to write a proper review (am quite knackered and emotionally drained from this).

Some quick thoughts

- The script is mostly excellent, as are the acting performances, especially from Lorna Brown and Justine Mitchell

- I thought the first half was stronger. The 'journey' is very convincing and I think it's much like the train of thought most people go through when contemplating the issue. First thinking it's a business transaction, before opening pandora's box of ethical and moral difficulty that comes with commercial surrogacy

- For me the weakest scenes were the ones with the surrogate. It seemed like she was sometimes doing random things that didn't serve much purpose beyond being a very long metaphor. I found myself being taken out of the action, and there were several scenes in the second half that I thought went on too long without furthering the play much.

- The strongest scenes for me were the ones between the protagonist, her father and her father's nurse. Some of the dialogue was razor sharp and really got to the heart of the extent we've detached ourselves from direct responsibility for the family - both the duty to look after her father and the carrying of her child had been outsourced, in the name of capitalist efficiency. It reminds me of the people I know in China and Hong Kong who work non-stop and have their childcare AND parental care needs outsourced to a plethora of nannies and servants. Confucius weeps in his grave.



- An obvious comparison is the recent version of Yerma. For me Bodies is a much more realistic and convincing story. Although it's not quite the visual spectacle, this is a much more thought provoking play that will stay with me longer.

Moderately enthusiastic reaction from the crowd. No standers or anything but definitely an appreciative audience.

3.5/4 stars out of 5 for me.

[theatre-turtle]

I agree with the previous comment about how we get so many plays/films/TV about a white person's guilt and reconciliation about his/her experiences with the developing world, with characters from these countries serving as plot devices to pave the way for such journey.

Obviously this is a salient issue in the circles these playwrights run in.