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[Deleted]

Apr 1, 2016 11:42:23 GMT @honouredguest said:

Alistair (Pomona) McDowall
Royal Court
Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Early tweets are ecstatic! This seems to be one to view in innocence, to get maximum full surprise value.

Seeing it tomorrow (after Bar Mitzvah Boy). After having seen Pomona I booked straight away for this on the playwright's name only.

[Deleted]

I'm going to have to be careful with this one. By the time I got to Pomona, it had received SO much hype that NO play could live up to it. I'm quietly optimistic for X but will keep my expectations at a reasonable pitch.

[partytentdown]

Keep seeing offers and competitions for this EVERYWHERE, is it just not selling?

[DuchessConstance]

I'm sorry, this might be an unpopular opinion but this was literally the most boring play I've ever seen and I saw Damned by Despair. I loved Pomona and went in with such high expectations!

and if you sit in the front row, you might

SPOILER: Click to show

get splattered with fake blood.

[Deleted]

Apr 1, 2016 15:00:56 GMT DuchessConstance said:

I'm sorry, this might be an unpopular opinion but this was literally the most boring play I've ever seen and I saw Damned by Despair. I loved Pomona and went in with such high expectations!

and if you sit in the front row, you might

SPOILER: Click to show

get splattered with fake blood.

Are they so tight they can't use the real thing?

And secondly fake or not it's a bitch to get out of Balenciaga cashmere

I am taking a bin bag

[DuchessConstance]

SPOILER: Click to show

I was fairly aggrieved, especially as I'd spent the past five minutes going, "That literally looks exactly like poster paint, come on, fake blood is seriously the easiest thing in the world to get."

[chameleon]

Agree with DuchessConstance, unfortunately. A dull and interminable play about a woman with too much time on her hands. A spectacular set and a lot of energetic acting don't do enough to disguise the slack writing and storytelling, lack of drama/conflict and paper-thin characterisation/psychology. There's some potentially interesting narrative and truth-bending - but successful formal innovation needs an intellectual rigour and emotional precision that this play doesn't have.  Perhaps this might've worked better at an hour long, rather than two, and in a less exposing venue?

A shame - it's an interesting set-up and with better dramaturgy could've perhaps become something good.

[Deleted]

Well, I just did a twitter search again and it's still all excitedly positive about the play, and I don't mean a bit, I mean gushing.

Strange....

Still, I'm seeing something early in a run for a change so don't have to wait to find out!

[jason71]

Watched this show last night. I quite enjoyed it. Found it funny, moving & disturbing. Good performances by all of the cast. The show clocked in at 140 mins.

[dlevi]

I was there last night as well ( for the first half anyway) - a spectacular set to be sure, but performances that, while committed, couldn't lift the play out of its dramatic stupor. The woman to my right was fast asleep and while her husband was enjoying it, at the interval she said: I'll wait for you in the bar until after the show. When I got on the tube to head home I noticed three people ( not together ) with their programmes -we'd all walked out. The playwright is clearly talented and I'm sure he has something to say but this was over indulgent claptrap.

[harry]

I know this is a typically annoying response of someone who enjoyed a play to someone who walked out at the interval, but this really is play in which the genius is completely in the second act.


I'm not going to spoil the plot but spoiler tags as the play is definitely best enjoyed cold. 

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}Act 1 is, by necessity, seemingly inconsequential and everyday. About halfway through we start to get the sense something is not quite as it seems and there's a freaky punch just before the interval but it is only in the much more fluid, unpredictable second half that we start to grasp quite what we were watching in the first half and the emotional impact in the final few minutes is very impressive.

It's proper Lynchian stuff. The sort of thing where different people will feel quite sure they understand it, but their interpretations may not match up. Yes the first half may seem like it's not going anywhere but stick with it and it's very rewarding.

[chameleon]

Having stayed to the end, I didn't think it Lynchian at all. 

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}
The second act seemed to carry plenty of influences - one could see elements of 'Mr Burns', 'Blue Kettle', and maybe 'Gravity' for a start - but didn't pull these ideas into a coherent whole, in terms of constructing the world of the play, or the narrative, or the psychology/emotions of the characters. Ambiguity can be interesting - but an audience still need to be made to care about what the truth might be, and the consequences of that truth for the characters - and this play doesn't do that. Lynch has more focus, and artistic control.

[DuchessConstance]

I definitely felt that I got it, I just felt it was tedious, derivative, and full of cliches.

[harry]

Fair enough. We clearly had very different experiences. I wouldn't say it had even shades of Mr Burns which was structurally completely straightforward all about a very specific "what if", not concerned particularly with the inter-relationships of the characters as much as the human reaction to the situation whereas this was all about the specific relationships between the characters but formally and structurally relatively unstraightforward. And the only similarity to Gravity is seemingly the fact both take place non on Earth. This to me was a psychological thriller that just happened to be set on a space station.

I would say that I was intrigued but mildly frustrated at the pacing and not having a clue at how things stacked up at the interval, but found the revelations and explanations in the second half justified this.

The response of the audience there was pretty ecstatic too at the end so it's definitely one that is very much for some people and very much not for others.

[DuchessConstance]

See, that's interesting, because I liked the first half a lot more. Relatively. I thought it was pretty derivative and tedious, but I enjoyed the basic set-up and seeing the situation unfold itself, and the growing sense that things were not as they seem. But I didn't feel that the second half enlarged on those enough.

I had time to write up my thoughts more in depth.

SPOILER: Click to show

Four people are stranded on a space station on Pluto, and grow crazy, start having hallucinations, and die. The plot is wafer-thin. Which is fine, as it's clearly supposed to be a psychological exploration of loneliness, guilt and anxiety. But to pull that off you need really deep characterisation and amazing dialogue, and this had neither. The characters are written fairly flatly and do not really grow or change over the course of the play. Gilda starts out a tense ball of anxiety, and finishes a tense ball of anxiety. If she has any personality traits other than 'anxious and uptight' they were not apparent. It also annoyed me how stereotypical the characters were: The white posh uptight bitch. The mouthy and overtly sexual working class girl. The Indian male maths geek. The working class, regional-accented LAAAAAAAADDD who walks around in his underwear. Ray was the only character who came across as more complex. I'll give fair credit, his scene with the bird calls was affecting and subtle.

I did like the stuff with the 'fifth' crew member and the slow realisation that she was not who she appeared to be, although it's such a ludicrously overused scifi trope and I don't care if it's not supposed to be a scifi play, or if it was an attempt to subvert or deconstruct a trope (it didn't feel like it was, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), I still couldn't help but think, "I've seen this exact storyline on every trashy one-season scifi show and Star Trek did it better. Hell even Torchwood did it better." It felt like watching scifi written by someone utterly unfamiliar with scifi. Like the details about how the earth had died. Intriguing but if you're going to use details that are in themselves well-worn tropes you need to work to make them not just repeating cliches. And I'm speaking as someone who loves apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic themes. Stuff like Far Away and the monologues from Escaped Alone both give me chills. But all the Last Trees stuff here just made me think, "The animated kiddie movie series Ice Age had literally that exact plot." Must try harder.

At the interval I felt that I had a reasonable idea of what was going on: "Okay so they're seeing visions of this girl, and she's either a hallucination (a shared hallucination, or one that one character is having and projecting onto the others) or they're literally being haunted by the ghost of a chronic masturbator."

Because the play starts with them in such a heightened state of anxiety, there wasn't anywhere for them to go in the second half except louder and more ostentatiously CRAZY. I wanted the second half to delve further into Mattie's character and the nature of the hallucinations and was disappointed. I enjoyed the possible ambiguity (are we supposed to take the frankly Eastenders-style revelation at face value, or did Gilda hallucinate her entire relationship with Mattie?) but I'm not sure if that was intentional. I'd actually much prefer the latter. I overheard someone say, "So the whole thing was about a woman going crazy because she had Working Mother Guilt?" I hope not. Does Gilda need a reason to go crazy? More of a reason than being stranded and left to die? And does her reason have to do with her maternal status?

In hindsight the Mattie mystery has stayed with me which is the sign of a good play. I'll give credit for that. Wasn't sure how well it fitted in with the rest of the play. The more I think about it the more I can see its potential. I think the problem really is that it's just not well-written. It felt like a first draft. The main flaw is the dialogue, which is so very bad. Cheesy and puerile. The 'joke' that made the audience laugh the hardest the night I saw it was one crew member looking over the shoulder of another who's working out some calculations, and saying, "Your maths is gash." This is literally the best joke in the entire play. The part that made me laugh hardest was when, during Gilda's descent into madness, a 8ft long dead bird is dropped onto the stage (a reference to the previously mentioned worldwide extinction of all birds decades earlier). The problem is, a giant stuffed parrot suddenly kerplunking down out of nowhere is funny. It just is. Ditto black-clad crewmembers scurrying on trying to discreetly drag the bloody thing offstage, silently swearing, while the scene continued around them. Long live the dead parrot!

[Deleted]

I thought this was thrilling. I work at times with younger theatremakers and it's rare to find a writer with a fully formed voice and with such control of their material. The way that the writing loops back and around, subtly morphing, planting seeds, and with a great ear for dialogue is dizzying and exciting.

So what is it 'about'? I'm sure there will be many differing interpretations but at its heart I believe this is a story of how millennials have been, and continue to be, royally screwed by baby boomers and beyond. It's as coruscating an attack from a generation being left to pick up the pieces as you can find. I went to see Pomona with a number of millennials and, similarly they responded to its world view, seeing/reading work from that generation there's a really interesting way of writing dialogue that Macdowall also has. A play being written for them to others rather than a play written by others to them.

Is it about four people? Really? It could be about one. Or two. Or X number of people. And is it on Pluto? Is it even in space? Is it anywhere? Or even just a mental construct? It's so slippy that even saying four people on Pluto is very much in question.

Sci-fi is never really about itself but about now, that's a given, so any comparison with sci-fi isn't going to get you far, although it's a nice touch that the writer takes the tradition of the last man standing, as per 2001 clearly paid homage to here, but making it a last woman standing, even with its own metatheatrical comment on such.

What is really interesting is how we are shown characters in stasis, stuck in space and time, unable to develop but just loop around, repeat, switch and finally disintegrate. The cast doing this are uniformly excellent, even down to the smallest role. Jessica Raine is predictably compelling but I was also very taken with Ria Zmitrowicz.

I don't want to give away more because there's so much to dig deep into and others will find their own connections and meanings. Don't bother with comparisons to Lynch or whatever, this has a different feel, the writer hasn't just looked at a few sources and copied them.

As for the production, by the time we are into the middle of the second half it has become not just well done but incredibly well done, especially in the melding of video, lighting and sound (sound being particularly so). With 'Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour' and this Vicky Featherstone is going to be having an excellent year, her direction is impeccable; when you look at the script you can see how much she built on it (a few pages in particular!). One example, in the first half Jessica Raine leant against a wall in a way which I found unusual, so I stored that memory, at one point in the second half it happened again but this time with a not just a meaning but realisation that the first half was really not what you thought it was (and this just one example of how the second half is an absolute necessity to understanding).

A few times a year I come out of a theatre not just having had a good time or enjoyed it but tingling with what I've seen, last year with the work of Barrel Organ, Kim Noble, Carmen Disruption and maybe a couple of others, for example. Count me with the Twitterati.

This won't appeal to everyone but, if it does, that tingle is hard to beat.

[chameleon]

Thanks Cardinal.

Reading your review, it's clear why the play appeals to you.

Perhaps you can expand on your 'millenials and baby boomers' interpretation? I am curious to know what you think we learn from this story.

[Deleted]

Apr 2, 2016 23:25:31 GMT chameleon said:

Thanks Cardinal.

Reading your review, it's clear why the play appeals to you.

Perhaps you can expand on your 'millenials and baby boomers' interpretation? I am curious to know what you think we learn from this story.

Much is made of the world being destroyed, the crew (or are they?) are the cast offs, mostly young and picking up the pieces alongside one older one who is destroying himself with his own guilt but, as I say, that's just my interpretation as there are a numerous possibilities planted. Macdowall being a writer from that generation I imagine that's why it came across so strongly to me. There is also plenty there about children and what we pass on which could take people down a different route I imagine. What it means? I think there's a widespread fear that we're on a downward slope, the next generation being less well off than their parents, our effect on the planet becoming more and more apparent and so on. It's too late even for a warning, it's more a cry from the dark (of space).

Of course between the baby boomers and millenials comes Generation X, but I think that's a coincidence!

[chameleon]

Interesting.

You write: 'Is it about four people? Really? It could be about one. Or two. Or X number of people. And is it on Pluto? Is it even in space? Is it anywhere? Or even just a mental construct? It's so slippy that even saying four people on Pluto is very much in question.'

What does this 'slippiness' tell us about millenials and baby-boomers?

[Deleted]

Apr 3, 2016 0:55:57 GMT chameleon said:

Interesting.

You write: 'Is it about four people? Really? It could be about one. Or two. Or X number of people. And is it on Pluto? Is it even in space? Is it anywhere? Or even just a mental construct? It's so slippy that even saying four people on Pluto is very much in question.'

What does this 'slippiness' tell us about millenials and baby-boomers?

It's not the same point, although I saw it as relating to the disintegration of a system or people within a system. Is a mind disintegrating because of being lost in space or is that a projection stemming from societal pressures? The ending could plausibly be said to have a hint of the latter, looking at who speaks and what they are saying.

[chameleon]

Ok. I think I'm still having a hard time seeing this. Maybe that's just because I'm not quite a millenial and the play isn't written for me?

But, looking at the second act, what would you say the 'X' sequence tells us about millenials and baby boomers? Or the 'cancer' sequence? Or the 'clock' sequence? Or the 'dead parrot' sequence? (Taken together, these sequences make up the majority of the second act. So it would be good to know how they fit into and progress your 'deep' interpretation of the play..)

[Deleted]

I haven't seen the play, so can't comment on it specifically. (At the moment, reading about it here, it's inspiring two conflicting reactions in me: "Ooh, this sounds intriguing" - because I like sci-fi and the questions it poses about our contemporary lives - but on the other hand "Save your money, you were bored enough with all that Caryl Churchill nonsense.")

I did, however, see both of the recent Churchills and Enda Walsh's Ballyturk (that one, twice). I had different interpretations of what I was seeing and hearing throughout and, to be honest, I don't think every bit of the material entirely backed one particular theory I had about meaning. I also know, from discussions with friends and on the old forum, others had wildly different opinions of these plays. But that's OK, isn't it? For me, anyway, the joy of the arts is that we don't have to apply scientific rigour.

[Deleted]

Apr 3, 2016 7:35:37 GMT chameleon said:

Ok. I think I'm still having a hard time seeing this. Maybe that's just because I'm not quite a millenial and the play isn't written for me?

But, looking at the second act, what would you say the 'X' sequence tells us about millenials and baby boomers? Or the 'cancer' sequence? Or the 'clock' sequence? Or the 'dead parrot' sequence? (Taken together, these sequences make up the majority of the second act. So it would be good to know how they fit into and progress your 'deep' interpretation of the play..)

As jeanhunt alludes to, if you think that my interpretation is 'the' one you are barking up the wrong tree and any attempt to persuade you of that robs you of your own. Suffice to say that there are other possible interpretations (do I have to keep repeating this?). Also you shouldn't look at this (and any play) as having one all encompassing message but there are elements of the context and action that you can use to create your own.

Personally I'm from the tail end of the baby boomers and well aware of how much better we've had things, so my own feelings of responsibility for that will likely feed into my own personal interpretation. The play isn't written for any particular person in any case, just written by a particular person.

However, if anyone has seen it and wants to know.....

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}The relationship between the central character and whatever she is hallucinating/living through appear to highlight elements of her fears and history. The colleague/lover and their absence, the fear of dying, nature turning against us, having no time left. These are applicable to anyone but they are put in a context where the world is dying and where the old were responsible for that death.

You won't see that if you don't want to. If you want to, you will.

[harry]

I wouldn't initially have phrased it in quite the same terms as Cardinal Pirelli but I think ultimately I share a similar interpretation.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}I think one of the things the play is ultimately about is the conflict at the centre of having children. On the one hand you can love your child so much to the extent that you can't imagine any part of your life before without also imagining him or her being part of it. On the other hand Gilda admits her motivation for having a child was so she didn't spend the rest of her life alone, despite the fact that she knows doing so will condemn her child to that very fate. Now, obviously that's a pretty extreme "living on Pluto" result but I do think the idea that people are motivated to have children to keep them company and look after them later in life is valid in many real life cases. And now having read Cardinal Pirelli's thoughts, the fascination with legacy, what children are given by their parents, and the cost to the children do feel very much modern Millennial generation concerns.

[partytentdown]

Mixed reviews this morning...