Theatre

Image credit: @dylan57elliott, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', UCL, 2023

Play reviews

There is, I think, no coincidence in polysemy: when a word adopts multiple (context-dependent) meanings. To play is to entertain an idea via imagination, just as a play is the imaginative presentation of an idea for the purpose of entertainment. Both the actor and the audience play with possibility - engaging in an imaginative game, forming a connection through which the character arises. For the actor embodies the idea meanwhile the spectator suspends disbelief to actualise it in creative space. (Or so my dissertation argued!). Since I am not acting too much these days, I more commonly (but still very willingly) adopt the role of spectator. My play reviews thus primarily reflect on the choices the actors have made in their portrayal of their characters - the ease at which myself, as an observer can suspend my disbelief, can play with ideas. This is crucial for the success of a performance, as a place and time to experience the multitudes we can or could contain, and on a less metaphysical note, the mere joy of fantasy. 

Plays!

"The whole world's a stage,// And all the men and women are merely players;// They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - William Shakespeare, As You Like It. As this metaphor so perfectly captures, it is not just in acting that we adopt - with varying degrees of success - the mask of an-other. Rather, it seems we are always self-othering: shifting our identity into different roles as children, siblings, friends, leaders, creatives, lovers, intellects... none capturing the whole, though none separable from it. To live authentically is to make these masks our own; it is not to be unafraid to wear them, but to give them unique meaning through the life we animate them with. In acting (in its non-metaphorical form) we rehearse for the play that is life. The possibilities it could entail - for uncertainty it ironically appears, is the only certainty. So here I share my insights from theatrical projects, and perhaps even some of my own. Playing the parts of actor and spectator with such ease (and here I just mean that I know what is required of me, and not more boldly that I do these things well!), it seems only fair to try my hand at play-writing too. Excluding the complex art of improvisation, without a script to interpret there are no characters to be embodied, plot to be portrayed, performance to be spectated...