Plays

I really should watch more plays!

 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Panama Dancers

A friend's daughter studied at the UEA, doing literature and drama. She became a member of an extremely good troupe of university students. I write about some of their performances here. There is one professional play. Can you tell the difference, by these reviews alone?

Dangerous Times (Custard)
What happens to the parents when the child assumes their own identity, one radically different from that they have long tried to cultivate? So enamoured with the glamour of rebellion, embodied in the young we too keenly celebrate, we miss the trauma of adults forced to confront an independent ego shattering a belief that the child is a copy of oneself. 

Look Underneath (Gabriel)
Let’s talk about appearances. They get in the way. They erect road blocks on the avenue of understanding, encouraging the lies, extending the ignorance...

Midlife Crisis (The Fastest Clock in the Universe)
It is the fantasies that condemn us. Like a dream continuing into our waking life, they pull us forever back into sleep; away from the world; its liveliness, its fun. So lovely these dreams; too lovely; their dazzling images an enervating drug, that weaken's the mind’s resistance, slowing it down, making it sluggish, that makes it dull.

A Visit to the Zoo (The Hairy Ape)
Inside a bottle marked freedom there is poison. The liquid is very sweet. We love it! It makes us feel so intoxicatingly alive. We love…for a few moments only. And then…the poison embraces our insides like…yes, a hairy ape, squeezing us to death.

A Young Poet Takes His Exam (The Ham Funeral)
The risk is always that the artist will be a dealer in secondhand ideas; ones acquired without thought or analytic penetration. Great and original thought is thought itself, not the ideas it generates; the outcome less important than the process. 

Strange Dreams (Cloud 9)
Sometime in the 1970s artists decided they would be fooled no longer. A few became activists, taking Bertie Brecht to the workingmen’s clubs, while others used their art to educate the bourgeoisie about capitalist exploitation. 

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