Happy Together, Partial Nudity and Echoes

Warning, this post is grim. It shouldn’t have been, but no way am I redoing it. Enjoy.

Happy Together is a play at C venues where the audience is split into two. The writer came up on stage and picked two volunteers to be the actors playing the couple in the play.

This strange start really confused me and the first few minutes were spent ignoring the plot exposition in favour of wondering about the suspiciously well rehearsed lines of the two volunteers. Then the next few minutes were spent feeling stupid when I noticed there was a picture of the two actors together on the bedside table, followed by confusion as to why that opening scene had been necessary at all.

I couldn’t tell you what was going on in the play. It didn’t make much sense to my sleep addled brain. There was a sense that a kinky relationship had either become so successful that the dominating man rarely dropped character or that he had revealed his true persona and become an abusive partner. Not only that but the woman seemed to be either an abused agoraphobe or a manipulative puppetmaster. Gone Girl, this is not, but it sure tries to be.

Afterwards I got talking to a lady who works at another venue (we both got in free) about what we thought of the show. We agreed it was quite confusing and proceeded to walk over to Zoo.

Here we watched Partial Nudity. This is a play where two strippers, one man and one woman, share a dressing room, which is the stage. The audience surround on three sides.

A fairly interesting play. The woman is an ice cold American feminist student, the man is a “lad” with little to no formal education and a dim view of birds. Both absolute goons, didn’t like either of them.

The most notable (the most nude) part of this play was when the woman sat in a chair and spread her legs in order to trim her pubes. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I suppose) we were sat on the side of the room which didn’t allow us to see whether she was actually nude.

I would recommend this one the most out of the plays I saw that day.

After that my new friend left (sob sob) and I met with colleagues for the next play which was in the same room anyway.

This was Echoes, a horror play. I have never once watched a horror play or film and decided afterwards it was a good use of my time and this was no exception.

Call me weird, but I don’t find made up stories of crazy women, men with their eyes gouged out, and dead children’s ghosts to be that scary. I find things like the whole situation of the Afghan poppy farmers (where they’re stuck between the UN who cut down their poppies, the Taliban who harvest them or demand a daughter as a safety bribe, and the actual heroin itself) or krokodil in Russia, wherein heroin addicts make a fake version using bleach and their skin falls off (do not, under any circumstances, Google this, and I mean that).

It was decent enough acting but by the end I kind of just wanted to leave. There was some kind of message about the relationship between mother and daughter but it was so caught up in the gory, screaming, crazy machinations of the play that I was too bored to care much about it.