It’s my local theatre, The Royal Court. Back in the day I was watching everything, usually standing for 10p cos of budget. I had a dream that when I was making proper money from my vocation, I’d be a member and get the perks. Maybe I will now things have started to work out at last. For now though I bought a ticket with the punters. £22.50. Back of the circle. Nobody behind me, didn’t need to take my hat off and could stretch.
Robyn is an old friend from The Factory. She’s South African, living in London. She is in A Good House there at The Court, and it opened tonight. Turns out Olivia is in the show too, a friend who used to live just down the road from me. Did someone once try and set us up? I think so. Neither of us really paid attention to it, we just lived twenty minutes walk from each other and, as with Tristan and Tanya, it’s extremely convenient when a friend gets with a friend as you get double the socialnessness for the same cost of time.
I stopped going to the RC for a while. There was this period where you could really HEAR the writing. It’s a new writing theatre so yes, of course. But it kinda lost its Mojo (that’s an in joke).
I’m booked to see Dan Evans reprise his role in 4:48 psychosis. I’ll be at The Other Place in June at 4:48am.
I love new writing, I love fresh takes, fresh output. I make noise every day because of that love, here. I’m not structuring and barely if ever proofread / reread. Sometimes I check it in the morning, if I went to bed hammered or angry. I’ve been known to excise great chunks and one entire blog. When you put thoughts out into the world in writing they can become more concrete to people who read them than they are for you.
I’ve been tempted for a while to feed my entire blog to an AI and then see what it generates bases on prompts. The thing that has stopped me is that I don’t want to feed this blog to such a model, even if the various LLMs have already scraped me and everything else ever published.
But this blog is manual, as you can tell by how many paragraphs it has taken before I finally resolve the opening. So much subjective noise. This is my blog, I can do what I want. But: I was at The Royal Court tonight, to see Robyn and Olivia and a remarkable company in their first preview of A Good House by Amy Jeptha.
We all think about privilege and identity all the time these days. We often present one thing but have lived something else. Class and economics and race. Blind spots, gatekeepers, social media. Whatever our perspective, there are people in this instant world who hate us for it and others who love us for it. It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s HARD to make a play that carries this but that isn’t trying to inform us how we must think about our privilege. This is a truly modern play, coming into the middle of a really spicy conversation and using a delightful construct of a house inhabited by notional undesirables, and a whole load of neurotic neighbours each with their own sets of social masks and learnt behaviours.
I think this play will run. I’m no judge of the industry though, they come with axes to wonderful things too often, way too often. But I think the threatened men might just avoid showing their weaknesses on this one lest they be exposed. It is so tight and clear and passionate and funny and weird and alive.
I loved it. I really loved it. Because it was masterful. Not just the writing, the direction, the fact it dared to make us wait for things that fed into character. The acting, where not a word fell fallow, actions were being actively played even in song, nothing went without target, without intention. I never had my inner demon shout “You don’t know what you mean.” Design is where my expertise starts waning but Lou has improved my view on it. The house was wonderful and funny and strange and it pleased me. I’m sure there’s stuff to get hold of but I won’t even notice if you’ve bleached your hair. Sound design was remarkable.
It’s a brilliant show. 1h 40 straight through, no interval, no re-entry. Nothing preachy here. A grown up show about grown up things. I’m rarely motivated to be so certain, but I reckon you all will get something out of this one, it’s a joy, it’s weird, it’s sad it’s funny. We, the audience, we all squirmed at different bits. I’ve never come across something so well judged before. Fully booked for first preview, I think we were a good house for A Good House. They deserve one every night and they’ll get one so if you don’t book fast you won’t see it.
AlBarclay 