Been to see two shows this weekend - in the absence of being in Edinburgh, trying to support London shows and assuage my envy at not being in the arts heart of August. But no fear! There are still fantastic things happening here in London, not all of our talent has been National Railed up to bonny Scotland for the summer.
On Friday night, I went to The Yard in Hackney Wick and saw Imagine You Are Everywhere At Once And Everything Seen, Heard, Said or Done Is By And For And To You (http://the-yard.co.uk/site/?page_id=10) . The play was a response to the persecution of artist Ai WeiWei (who painted all the sunflower seeds for the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern) and was inspired by Ai's use of Twitter. It was definitely an intruiging and engaging piece of theatre - we sat in the stage space and watched the actors in the audience, which worked very well considering the cast was about 40 people strong and it meant we had a good view of everyone involved, and also created a strong visual impression of all these people, from different spaces and places, connecting via social media. The acting was excellent all round, was very impressed with everyone's delivery and tone, keeping the interest up even though the only movement in the entire piece, apart from at the very end, was people standing up and sitting down again. It was certainly very topical and acutely relevant in light of the rioting this past week because towards the end the play moves into a protest and a discussion of uprising and reaction against governmental persecution of Ai.
I think that the play was really well written, impressive for a first play, would love to chat to the writer about his process. I suppose my constructive criticism would be that, if the play were done again, it could be interesting to explore the use of some movement and physicality, to make the play a more firmly theatrical experience and really make use of the medium that is theatre. It was a little bit too static for my tastes, but then as I understand it from friends involved in the process, it was put together in a day, so understandably no room for putting in much physicality.
I suppose my other comment would be on the price - my friend and myself booked online and got charged a bit of a whopping booking fee, and considering the performance was script in hand, I thought it was a bit off. I understand that the venue needs to keep going and it isn't easy, but I think people are likely to be more generous if you give them the option to pay what they can or similar. You see, the following day after seeing this I saw a fully professional, off script performance on a pay what you can price, so I think that pop-up venues should be considering things like this. That said, I do appreciate the difficulties in funding a venue. But I think that the ethos of the venue should match its pricing - if you want to attract the local community make sure you are welcoming them, and that is so often a financial thing. But anyway, a lot of that is my own personal politics and I have not been a part of running a pop-up venue so I have no true idea of the costs involved.
As me and my friend left the industrial estate, we heard a really beautiful tweeting bird which seemed to be coming from a mess of metal and MDF...was quite surreal.
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