Tuesday 16 September 2008

Long Haul Theatre

Well Sock Monkey & Mrs P went to the theatre on Sunday. The show started at 1pm and ended at 10pm!!!! Good Lord you can fly to America in less time.

We went to see Lipsynch by Robert Lepage who is a GENIUS theatre director. I've seen a couple of his productions before: Tectonic Plates, Polygraph, The Seven Streams of the River Ota. It is very difficult to describe what he does but it is very special and very visual.

Anyway Lipsinch follows the story of 9 characters over 70 years. The stories all interweave and culminate in a very sad story. From the young mother who dies with her baby in her arms to the opera singer who adopted him, to her neurosurgeon husband and the woman he operates on, to his patient and her schitzophrenic sister, the elderly speech therapist who helped the opera singer when she was a child, the home help who cooked and cleaned for the elderly woman, the brother who sexually abused the home help when she was a child, the pimp who provided girls for him, the pimp's contact in Nicaragua who sold his niece to him, the journalist who rescued her, and finally to the baby she left behind when she died. P was actually crying at the end. Beautiful opera, dialogue spoken in English, French, Spanish and German coupled with first class acting.

Both the audience and the theatre group went through a huge journey together. 9 hours and it was something very special.

Robert Lepage really is a genius. You can't go see it at the Barbican though. We went on the last night of the UK premier. Bad luck!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know, I think I could probably make a very good docu-drama about my life. WOnder if we could make money off it? People would say, what an imagination, but it would all be true. Follow my journey from tortured eldest child, to boozy tart, , to not -quite-divorced mother of 2, pregnant by a 24 year old sailor,to bigamist, to happily married semi-mature woman, to ( currently) menopausal old bat who forgets everything that happened any recently than qo years ago. Oh, and who can no longer compose a coherent sentence. Love ya! Fionna

Anonymous said...

Sounds just like an episode of Friends.

The bigamy part wasn't really your fault. Its just your dopey ex-husband not bothering ti sign some papers.