There was a lot I loved: it was immersive, it was absorbing, it was thrilling; the staging was creative and dynamic; I clapped at several points; I laughed out loud at many more, as did the rest of the audience.
But even as I enjoyed it in the moment, the overall experience left me feeling a little sour and a little disappointed. I don't think I can recommend it without some major caveats, and I won't be seeking out a recording, despite having been seriously considering it by the interval.
Content notes for rape/sexual assault/dubious consent, The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too, Posh White Person Talks About Race And Class, heteronormativity, sizeism.
In that I have studied Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth at secondary school (including being shown Macbeth on the Estate; our teacher attempted to fast forward through the dubious stairwell sex scene In Accordance With Edict and actually just got the VHS stuck on it); Twelfth Night in a variety of set-ups, largely at the Edinburgh Fringe, where I very much enjoyed it (it was SO GAY); and I have furthermore seen All's Well That Ends Well and A Midsummer Night's Dream as parts of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival (John's, I think, and Girton, respectively, and in fact almost certainly More Plays I just don't remember... which).
The thing I've seen unambiguously the most variants of is Much Ado About Nothing, which is My Fave. My cousins introduced me to the 1993 Branagh/Thompson film; the Joss Whedon travesty, once only, so that I had; the Tate/Tennant production; an incredibly American Shakespeare-in-the-park production in LA back in 2011; and a version in the Globe, a few years ago, which I thought I had written up but cannot immediately find and will attempt to dig up in the morning, but right now I am going to bed.
... please ask me about my feelings about Much Ado and the variations in staging I have seen. I HAVE FEELINGS.
A couple of weeks ago, The Indelicates' latest project: Paradise Lost, reimagined as a rock musical set in a racist 1950s US holiday resort. I was lucky enough to be part of one of the initial readthroughs several years ago now, in the top room of a Brighton pub, and was absolutely delighted to see how it had changed and developed. It contains the Indelicates' first (I think) proper love-song-to-rock-music, which is a subgenre I have a very deep fondness for.
Yesterday I went to see Fun Home at the Young Vic, with the usual suspects (i.e. me_and, shortcipher, and sebastienne), having booked it when its run was first announced sometime... last year; it's been something in the far far future that I've been vaguely looking forward to for a long time. (P got me the book while I was living in the Coniston Coppermines youth hostel lo these many years ago for my third-year mapping project; I read Are You My Mother? earlier this year, from the library.) I started crying when Baby Alison stood up on stage and sang a song about Seeing Her First Butch: here, here is this kid, who can stand on stage and sing that song and it's okay and it gets better and, yeah, I... did not stop crying until sometime after the end. I loved loved loved so many of the things they did with it. I... might try to write a proper review? But I loved it, and I'm so glad I went, and it's not just because the way Bechdel draws herself looks eerily similar to my therapist so I've mentally amalgamated the two of them into Queer Elder Who Gets It And Wants Me To Be Okay.
Following that we wandered along the Thames a little and I ended up being approached by an older Irish woman and asked for mobility aid recommendations on the strength of being out and about with power-assist wheels. I eventually persuaded her to try them. She is a convert, she is the latest person to insist that I should be getting commission on them, and she has my phone number so she can text me if she has questions.
This morning I actually froze the probably-jostaberry sorbet made up with allotment fruit according to the Ruby Violet recipe (give or take my intense suspicion that 15g of lemon zest was a good idea). It is beautifully coloured and a bit more cronch than intended because we went off for board games in the middle, but basically AAAAAAH SKILL ACQUISITION. (It took me an embarrassingly long time, on Friday, to realise that given that it was for blackcurrant sorbet it really didn't matter if I couldn't find glucose powder without added vitamin C.)
When jack posted about the boardgame Photosynthesis earlier this week I looked at his review, thought "ooh that maybe sounds like me_and's kind of thing? maybe I should get it for him?", and then dithered a lot over how thoroughly to check with him before buying it as, potentially, a Surprise Present. So I was mightily amused when we rocked up at a boardgame social organised by a friend this afternoon that... it was out on the table waiting to be played as our host's first pick. I screwed up the final two moves through misunderstanding and vagueness (and, frankly, the pineapple/raspberry margharita) so lost instead of winning, but, like, I played a new game? Without reading the rules through thoroughly and obsessively first? In semi-public? So I continue deeply impressed with myself, and A is in fact interested in getting a present of Trees Are Mean And Also Bullies. I, meanwile, was just very amused by Growing A Plant. (Also played Dixit for the first time, with people I don't know terribly well, and didn't lose abjectly and did mostly enjoy myself! So that's a thing.)
Pottered off to the allotment this evening, confirmed that the gooseberry is spiky and a gooseberry, checked on the squash that didn't really need watering and watered them anyway, constructed a scaffold for the grape (which has actual proto-grapes on, what even is this), and picked A Lot of blackberries.
1. Yedi Kocalı Hürmüz at the Arcola several weeks ago now, performed by the in-house Turkish-language company (Arcola Ala-Turka), with my friend D. A little rough around the edges (e.g. the surtitles frequently just sort of... didn't) but the energy & the audience engagement were fantastic, particularly in the segments that were just sort of... mini interconnected folk gigs? Lots and lots of clapping (and singing) along. I was very entertained -- there was comedy "whack people over the head with an inflatable stick and over-the-top sound effect" that worked really well -- and I even understood the occasional word and sentence fragment, go me.
2. Baby's first paper has been formally accepted. It is going into various preprint archives as we speak; I will link once it's actually usefully available. (Did I mention how good it is that I fixed the graphics driver issue with my desktop such that it's actually usable? It is SO GOOD.)
3. Off to Cornwall on Thursday, for approximately a fortnight, for the hundredth-birthday-that-isn't, coming back for the middle weekend because Reasons. I am looking forward to it. I will be bringing wild garlic back to plant out. Cornwall in early May is, in my unquestionably objective opinion, the best place in the entire world.
4. Frantically getting lab work finished up for pre-interruption-of-studies before that, so far as possible. Cocked up yesterday in a way that adds an extra week in lab (boo) but it was one I would otherwise have been anxious about not doing (yay), so that's worked out fairly well.
5. British strawberries, reduced in the supermarket. Yes. Good.
6. Started thyroxine (low-ish dose) on Friday last (the 20th). So far no conclusive changes, but excitingly the water is muddied by the part where I finished the most recent course of iron supplementation right before I started the thyroxine.
7. Have had first salad-and-cheese-and-bread dinner of the year on the PATIO. We have a PATIO. It has been WARM. I am very excited by this, and also by linens.
8. I have participated in A Bunch of research recently -- autism + the social model of disability in higher ed, intersection of trans status + disability, Being A Grumpy Tran At Market Researchers for fun and profit (and actually they were really great and give me hope), miscellaneous cognitive function for the long-term psychiatric study I'm participating in (£15 in vouchers, whoo).
9. Voucher has thus far been used on a bamboo travel mug, with a succulent pattern and duck-egg-blue silicone bits. (staranise, I keep restraining the urge to put together the succulent-themed care package you did not ask for and probably don't want because it would be silly to do the Shipping To Canada thing if you don't, but if you'd like preposterous succulent-themed tat let me know and It Will Happen.)
10. I spent a lot of the weekend making friends (at A's step-relative's Significant Birthday Thing) with both nibling S (who has, correctly, decided I am interested in them, and now greets me with enthusiasm) and -- which is what I was going to go with when I started this point -- a ridiculous ornamental cherry, which had the big-blousy-white blossoms as most of its canopy... and one branch, comprising about a third, that had been grafted on from a dark-purple-leaves and bright-pink-flowers tree. It was Good. I went and patted it on the graft and told it it was good, and made A admire it.
(The mint I rescued from the supermarket has established itself sufficiently aggressively that I'm starting to worry for the parsley it shares a tub with. I shall clearly just have to consume more of it.)
This afternoon: matinee performance of The Nutcracker, English National Ballet, with A. It was the last (or very nearly the last?) performance and it seemed fairly obvious the performers were tired: while the dancers were naturally managing an impressive amount of "this incredible feat of physical exertion? pfff it's effortless", they were also less precise than I'd have expected on timings (so the overall choreography was a bit less coherent than it might have been), and I spotted at least one pretty bad ankle wobble. Costumes beautiful, sets beautiful, brass slightly out of tune on occasion as is the way of brass. The story was if anything slightly more incoherent than usual -- Drosselmeyer was compering the entire Kingdom of Sweets sequence??? Clara and the Nutcracker were not terribly distinct from the Sugar Plum Fairy and her consort??? the Nutcracker kept inexplicably having a mask removed and replaced??? -- but there was a BALLOON and I am v pleased to have seen such a large and professional performance.
The otherForward Arena production I've seen (this one sadly only twice) is Children and Animals. C+A is a charming little one-hour show about anxiety, relationships, communication, stories, sex work and kink. As far as I know, it hasn't been peformed since 2016 and is unlikely to get staged by Forward Arena again, which on the one hand I can understand and on the other think is rather a pity.
I have talked before about Callisto and how amazing it is; it's just finished another month-long run at the Arcola, and I'm sorry I didn't point it out to you all here before, er, one hour after the end of the closing performance. However! The script is now available for sale, in paperback, it's a tenner, and I have a lending copy.
Having seen it three times in Edinburgh and once during its week-long run last year, I went to see it twice this year -- once on opening night, and once halfway through, when the performance was followed by a Q&A. Opening night contained a fantastic fumble during the Tammy sequence (Harold dropping the gun and subsequently asking Lola for a glass of soy milk; the overall effect was much more threatening and gaslighty, and the actors recovered superbly); there were a few variations in how it was acted and directed that I thought were fascinating and, er, got invited to e-mail the poor director about. I'M SORRY I'M LIKE THIS, but also here is my e-mail reproduced in full For Posterity and also in case any of you lot like it. There Are Spoilers. You're welcome.
("GIVEN that you've mentioned past productions," I said, beginning my question, "I'm assuming close readings of the text are okay, SO, without going into egregious detail about my own interpretations--" -- or something like that, anyway; whereupon I got the response "No, I'd like to hear them!" -- "Okay, but the rest of the audience might not!" "... fair point." "-- well...")
Forward Arena are a tiny queer theatre company whose Kickstarter I'd been totally unaware of, but it turns out I love what they do so much that I went to see their two plays a combined total of five times -- Callisto and Children & Animals once each with sebastienne and shortcipher, then Callisto once with sebastienne, shortcipher and me_and once he'd joined us, and then Callisto and Children & Animals once more with me_and on the final day of the Fringe, after E-B & C had departed.
Callisto is on at the Arcola Theatre, London, next week only, in expanded form -- I'm going to see it on Friday, and there are till tickets available. Come squee with me, if appropriately located?
Callisto was described, in the Kickstarter blurb, as:
CALLISTO: A QUEER EPIC, by Howard Coase
"I don't believe the word love has ever meant the same thing twice."
London, 1680: Arabella Hunt is the star of La Callisto, and one half of the first recorded gay marriage in UK history.
Worcester, 1936: Alan Turing pays one final visit to Isobel Morcom, the mother of his lost first love.
San Fernando Valley, 1979: Tammy Frazer lands in Callisto Studios searching for the love of her life.
The Moon, 2223: Lorn is building a paradise to sleep in but Cal is determined to keep him awake.
Callisto: A Queer Epic circles around a constellation of four queer stories scattered across time and space, spanning the historical and the fictional plus everything in between, reframing past narratives and sculpting future worlds, unravelling closed ways of thinking and straight ways of seeing.
... and I love (loved! loved loved loved) it so much. It was brilliantly written, and brilliantly staged, and brilliantly costumed, and I love it.
A while back I spotted that the Globe was putting on Much Ado this season; given that It's My Favourite and there were tickets to be had for a fiver, there was no way I wasn't going, and I somehow managed to talk me_and into it in despite of the fact that he'd not seen any Shakespeare live previously and hadn't ever read Much Ado; on top of which he very kindly left work early in order that we could get to the Globe in sufficient time that I wouldn't be going above baseline anxious.
This turned out to be a very good thing. In that he'd booked online, and I'd subsequently phoned them up (go me) to book the wheelchair space in the Yard and had had it all confirmed, and we got there and another wheelchair user was already installed in that space. "Um," said front-of-house, and took our tickets, and disappeared down to the box office to triple-check. "Um," I said, and proceeded to fret quite a lot that I'd somehow fucked up the phonecall. (I hadn't. An actually sort of fascinating bug in their systems showed up, which they're going to fix for next time.) Right, said front-of-house, well, there's several options, we can ask the wheelchair user in place to move (... but they did book, it seems, and they did arrive an hour ago in order to make sure everything would be okay...) or we can offer you the other wheelchair-accessible space up in the box, come into the Yard and we'll point it out to you so you can decide, or we can ask people to move so you can be right up against the stage, or...? -- we're happy to take the box, please don't move the other wheelchair user, we said, and front-of-house vanished off to negotiate with people already up there and then reappeared to take us up via the backstage lifts, with a request to the actors en passant that they hold off another 3 minutes to give us time to install ourselves. And then one way or another we were squeezed in such that we could sit next to each other rather than having me up hard against the balcony edge and facesfriend perched behind me, and we were given a free copy of the programme so I can devour all the additional programme notes, and it was actually handled really well and I am duly impressed (and have e-mailed in to thank them some more).
Feminasty; Megan Ford. Stand-up, and definitely the show I liked best of the ones I saw (if one treats Hearts of Folk as distinct from one- or two-person stand-up). We were clearly not quite the target audience (in that we know what an intersectionality is and it was clearly an outreach-and-education show); HOWEVER it came with badges and a ZINE and wigs and a song and a willingness to engage thoughtfully with "are you aware that this specific thing you did is a little ideologically unsound". So! I grinned a lot and enjoyed it, and this is not an unmitigated recommendation but it is a recommendation.
Lying, Cheating Scoundrels; Morgan & West. I had not seen this show before! Gambling-focussed sleight of hand, for a very small audience (it will happen until the end of the Fringe run, after which they are apparently getting rid of the specific table because they no longer have storage space for it); I got called Isembard a lot, which very predictably made me very happy. Statistics, how to cheat at cards, ridiculous topological and physics-related tricks, and a very warm room that made the cards exceedingly sticky. Not one of their shows I had previously got to see, and I was delighted by it :-)
And then as we were leaving to catch a cab to the station (I write this on the Caledonian Sleeper), I finally caught (instead of just hearing) evening fireworks at the castle. Lovely lovely end to trip.
Shout-outs:
lunch @ David Bann, which gets its own write-up (to follow)
Frisky Froyo kind of epic (mango popping boba on froyo = best idea) in that we went there twice for mid-afternoon snacks between shows (yes I'm sorry I'm awful)
Transreal is a speculative fiction bookshop on Candlemaker's Row with a pretty excellent and clearly carefully-curated stock; f'rex one of the items on the shelves was a Subterranean Press edition (1241/1500) of Unlocked, and it was beautiful and also the first time I'd seen a SP edition in person, so that was very exciting; and he'd also got misc Nnedi Okorafor, HURRAH.
Today's bonus shout-out goes emphatically and unequivocally to Over Langshaw Ice Cream and in particular their stand at the top of Grassmarket. They insisted I try a spoonful of the pink peppercorn & heather honey-flavoured ice cream before they'd serve me a scoop, and it was phenomenal and merely served to confirm that I absolutely wanted it. I don't know what their raspberry sorbet was like, because there were enough other flavours I desperately wanted in my face that I didn't get THE THING I ALWAYS GET if it is available, but I have no doubt it would have been fantastic; as it was I got a scoop of the thing mentioned above (and you could taste the heather, and there were occasional bursts of pepper, and it was glorious), and a scoop of the Cranachan (whisky, honey, rasperries, toasted oats), and this was absolutely the correct decision. And it turns out that Over Langshaw farm are the suppliers of eggs to yesterday's creme brulee van...! (Azz, the website has photos of their hens.)
Endings. I was in the middle of a really bad pain flare for this on so was mostly staring blankly into space while waiting for the painkillers to kick in. Two-person sketch show.
MC Escher exhibition. This was the thing I really wanted to get to; it's a collection of almost 100 works (including very early pieces) plus bits and bobs of correspondence, and in addition to better understanding how his most famous works fit together (many of the early sketches played with perspective and perception in Italian landscapes, and clearly informed the very-very-different-to-the-foreground backgrounds of Waterfall and Belvedere) I've acquired some new favourites: Phosphorescent Sea (1933), Porthole (1937) (entirely made up of diagonal lines!), Still Life and Street (1937), Puddle (1952). Additional mentions to Magic Mirror (1946), Other World (1947)Dewdrop (1948), Three Worlds (1955), Snakes (1969). Beautifully curated; I absolutely recommend this if you get any chance at all to go.
An Hour Long Sinister Wink. Two-man cabaret; largely competent though tuning on the cello was a little shaky. Ended up triggering me really very badly, which is to say that I don't particularly feel like talking about it in more detail.
Me, delightedly holding out a tiny takeaway raspberry-meringue creme brulee in my cupped hands.
Not Disabled... Enough! Accessible venues are a lie. Charming in parts & the performer was a sweetie; my main take-home, though, was that I really should get my act together to write a comedy show to take to Edinburgh next year.
Women's Hour, by Shit Theatre. YES YES YES. Content notes galore, but handled excellently and respectfully and it made me laugh a lot; the venue gets a solid 3.5/5 for accessibility, and the performers get a 5 as far as I'm concerned. Music-singing-physical theatre; we are contemplating designating Friday afternoon For Repeats and doing this again then along with Black.
Hearts of Folk. I was self-flyering for this one -- I was amused by the image and assumed it would be a bunch of folk music that the useless ex and I would quite enjoy and sebastienne would tolerate for the sake of watching our faces. ... IT WAS NOT FOLK MUSIC. It was, however, an excellent and loving pastiche of vicious music-scene gossip and folk in general. Absolutely delightful. Adored it. A+ self-flyering, would self-flyer again.
Rent (from New York). Holy SHIT I had never seen Rent before and was familiar with only one of the songs (and a filk of it at that). I. I. I started fucking bawling my eyes out (in the best possible way) partway through the first half, and continued bawling my eyes out all the way through the second, to the extent that enough of the actors noticed it that I was deemed In Need Of Hugs when they were going off after final bows. I. It was amazing. Beautiful singing, beautiful physical work, band in the pit jamming misc other shite during intros and breaks, beautiful set design given the constraints of the Fringe, yes yes yes fucking yes, maybe I will be more coherent about it on another occasion but basically yeS YES Y E S.
Saucy Jack & the Space Vixens. Right around the corner from where we're staying, and it had loud bass and brightly coloured lights and lots of glitter and was pleasantly mindless and pleasantly unabashedly cheerful and was a good way to wind down (provided not paying too much attention, ha) after the above, which, yeah, BAWLING. (I have decided I can only manage one show that makes me cry that much per day.)
ADDITIONAL SPECIAL BONUS MENTION TO Chapter 1 of Ancillary Mercy, which arrived in my e-mail today and which I read in the foyer while waiting to be let in to Rent, and promptly flailed about to anyone who would listen (vass, reply to come when it's not way past my bedtime and I am actually situated so as to have internet xx)
A Matter of Life and Debt. Entertaining physical theatre, excellent use of minimal props, somewhat incoherent story but it gave the impression of being designed to showcase as many different Things Each Actor Could Do as possible... in the format of a bureaucracy montage. Think Jupiter Ascending meets Wizard of Oz (in that everything was green and occasionally velvet). I was kiiiind of uncomfortable with one scene's handling of disability and some language in general, but pleasant enough.
Le Gateau Chocolat: Black. SEE THIS IF YOU POSSIBLY CAN. I WAS CRYING BY NOT VERY FAR IN AND THEN JUST... KEPT CRYING. I INTEND TO SEE IT AGAIN BEFORE WE LEAVE IF I CAN POSSIBLY SWING IT. Pro tip: the level-access entrance to this venue is up the fucking hill from the main entrance, and bears a sign which reads FIRE EXIT NO ENTRY. Autobiographical one-man cabaret; trigger warnings for racism, lynchings, gender policing, homophobia, homophobic violence, abuse, abusive relationships, sizeism, depression, suicide, and probably some other things I'm forgetting -- but it was brilliant, and it is important and it matters and on top of that it is absolutely stunningly gorgeous, and I am absolutely serious about wanting to go back and see it a second time. Or, you know, every day.
Plus two I didn't much care for, which carry all the trigger warnings. (Yes, this is a trigger warning for trigger warnings.)
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