Like a Fishbone and Women Beware Women

Well I have quite a lot to catch up on so I've broken it into two posts. This one is about the plays I saw before I left for Paris.

The first play of the week was entitled Like A Fishbone, and it was at the Shepherd Bush Theater. The theater is in what looks to be a refurbished townhouse, and it is definitely a little cramped. Walking up two flights of stairs to the main theater, one gets the sense that one is walking into a living room. The actual theater has seating around three sides, with the space decorated to look like an architect's office. The play was about a woman who comes to see the architect who is designing the memorial for a school shooting that happened in their town. The woman lost her little girl in the shooting and has appeared in London to ask the architect to change her design for the memorial, which is to preserve the schoolhouse exactly how it was on the day of the shooting, so everyone can see. The mother is blind and fiercely religious, the architect, also a mother, is staunchly atheistic. The play is an 75 minute dialogue about the merits of religion, history, preservation, class, children, motherhood, life, love and it was positively wonderful. The script was completely original and deserves to be well known. At the end you're forced to pick a side, either the religious mother or the atheist architect, and that is what theater is supposed to do.

Thursday night we saw a play at the National Theater called Women Beware Women. The play was written in the 1600s by a man named Thomas Middleton, to reflect the excess, greed, and sex of the times. The version of this play was updated in design, but not in language. The stage was a on a massive rotating platform, that on one side would be a beautiful Medici mansion, complete with chandeliers and marble floors, and on the other side was some pipes, a light bulb and some dingy doors to reflect the poorer side of town. This play is funny and tragic, combining things like wit, slapstick, dance, rape, seduction, revenge, and murder. The end scene was arguably the most impressive thing I've ever seen on stage. It took place at a masquerade ball, with the stage rotating constantly and big band jazz playing in the background. Almost every major character was murdered in one way or another: stabbing, poisoning, strangling, etc., as everyone in the background was attending the party. It was pretty much indescribable. I was blown away, as was pretty much everyone else in the theater.

This next week is going to be a great week for theater. Warhorse, Enron, and Nevermore. Stay tuned.