Thursday 31 January 2008

Blackwatch

I should have written this a week ago, when the emotional impact was still fresh in my mind and heart, but I think I couldn't write it last week when the emotional impact was still fresh in my mind and heart because it's literally taken me that long to absorb and process it.
As part of my New Year's "Be Involved" campaign (see entries below) I fought tooth and nail to get tickets to Blackwatch, one of two works by the National Theatre of Scotland being performed at CarriageWorks as part of the Sydney Festival. I literally managed to score the last single ticket left in Sydney. This production has already toured extensively around Europe and America and has received universally positive responses wherever it went, which is obviously part of the reason I was so intent on getting a ticket. On another, concurrent yet perverse level, however, it also made me sort of apprehensive, because I have had some bad experiences with art/theatre/literature/etc that is meant to be The Best Thing Ever and then is somewhat underwhelming (or, in the case of The God of Small Things, just plain hateful.) So I approached the performance - on Friday 25th of January - with excitement mixed with just the tiniest bit of cynicism - "surely no theatre is that good" and trepidation -"what if I'm the only person in the known universe to not like this show?"

Well. Suffice to say I shouldn't have troubled my pretty little head. I can safely put my hand on my heart and say it was one of, if not THE, most amazing peices of theatre I have ever seen and I am sure it is an experience that will stay with me throughout my hopefully long life in said industry.

Because the National Theatre of Scotland have unfortunately packed up and departed our fair shores without most of my constituents having been privy to this performance, I feel no hesitation in spelling out any plot details.

The play is derived from interveiws, conducted by the writer, with a particular group of soldiers who had left the Black Watch after being on a recent tour of duty in Iraq. The Black Watch is the oldest regiment in Scotland and possibly in Britain - important facts like this tend to escape me, go Google it or something. Anyway. So they're in Iraq. And these are tough, Scottish highland boys who want to be soldiers - who have been soldiers for many years - who have been to Iraq before, and Kosovo, and other places. They're not stupid. This is their job. They enjoy it and they're not expecting it to be easy. But from the begining of the play, we know they've left and they're not going back. Why?

The play explores this issue in conjuction with the fact that part way through their mission, the Black Watch - previously a distinct and distinguished and honoured regiment of the British Army - was being amalgamated into the general corps. So they're out there, in a desert, 42 men doing a job that hundreds of Americans had been doing before them, wondering why they're doing it, and then the one thing that they're fighting for - their identity as The Black Watch - is taken away from them.

Combining verbatim interveiws, fictional scenes, battle sequences, video projections and more expletives than even I could shake a stick at, Blackwatch is not really a political play. That is, it does not set out with a political agenda (and thank fuck, and someone should tell Australian thespians to sit up and take note that not all theatre has to Be About An Issue to be about an issue) but it cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Iraq war was and is a monumental fuckup. But more importantly, it is about the people. About why these men are fighting, and what it is like to be fighting. The characters refuse to be pigeonholed, which made it so unbelievably watchable. And emotional. And...connecting.

By the play's wrenching conclusion - the audience watches three characters blown to pieces by a suicide bomber and they fall, suspended on wires, from scaffolding, covered in blood, for a full minute - I felt truly bound to every person in that theatre and in that cast. I wanted to turn to the woman next to me and offer to give her a hug.

As a theatre student, you here a lot about actor-audiences conncections and the catharsis of theatre and all this sort of thing. You know, that truly great theatre involves the audience in a genuine and truthful moment and allows us to surrender ourselves to a different reality. That by allowing theatre to generate certain emotions within us we can feel a certain therapeutic release. You know the stuff. And it all sounds great in theory, on paper, in class. And sometimes you even get close, watching stuff in class or at the STC or wherever. But in the back of your head, you're thinking, it's probably just a little bit of crap. Theatre can't really change the world. This is a self indulgent art form. There will always be a point at which the audience stops and the stage begins.

Well, ladies and gents, I am here to tell you, it ain't so. It doesn't happen very often, but truly, there are diamonds in the sea of shit that theatre can be. Sitting there in this old warehouse, watching these young Scottish men mime the words of love letters, I truly believed that if I could make one other person feel as intensely as I did that night with any work I do in the theatre, life will have been just that little bit more worth it.

Tuesday 15 January 2008

You know that feeling

When you sleep in, and there's no pressure to get up, and you can just lie in bed, undisturbed, and the sun is coming in through the windows, and there's a bit of a breeze as well, and you're just lying there, letting the day wash over you, letting the fact that you have nowhere to be just wash over you, this comforting thought that you are exactly where you want to be, just in this second, this moment in time, and you just feel this twinge of complete and utter happiness, and it's actually quite a scary, overpowering feeling, so whole and undiluted that for a second there you could actually cry you're so happy. Does anyone else ever get that? And you just want to laugh out loud because everything just seems so perfect and safe. And the only thing that could possibly, possibly make this moment better is someone to share it with.

Monday 14 January 2008

Specktacular!

My dear darling cousin Naomi, being the kind and generous soul that she is, for Christmas/birthday bought my sister and I tickets to the Spicks and Speck'tacular - the live show of Spicks and Specks - at the Enmore Theatre on the 12th of January. It was a highly entertaining evening and was a brilliant remedy to my somewhat tired and work-weary mind. Adam Hills is a lovely fellow - very sedate and likeable while being funny at the same time. Good old Myf and Alan slot in nicely to the whole act too.
What DOESN'T slot in nicely are STUPID audience members who get up on stage (they played the game with audience members as contestants) and think they are funnier than the three professional funny people COMBINED and spend the entire evening trying to out do them, thinking that regular expletives and stupid dances will somehow win over the crowd. Sweeheart - NO ONE PAID $42.90 TO SEE YOU. GO HOME.

Friday 11 January 2008

27 Dresses

Please don't expect me to make some sort of serious, mature, reasoned analysis of this film, because it's just not going to happen. Basically, Katherine Heigl is hot, James Marsden is hotter, the plot is of the "just add water" variety and everyone is happy in exactly the way you expect them to be by the end. It's not as clever as 10 Things I Hate About You but it's not as stupid as How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days. It was exactly what I felt like watching at the time and despite its predictability, the audience can't help but get involved in the emotional lives of the characters. There were even a few indignant gasps and shocked "Ooh"s from the audience, which I thought was nice. Like I said, Katherine Heigl is hot, plus she's also incredibly natural and likeable on screen - an actor playing a "normal girl" you can actually relate to. Her on-screen sister is a bit of a pain - a B-grade Cameron Diaz. There's a bit too much of lines like, "I'm not doing this with you right now", the likes of which positively grow like mould on American romantic comedies and infest my brain to the extent that they're the kind of ridiculous, meaningless things I say whenever I'm having relationship issues of my own. Stay for the closing credits - they're the most subtley entertaining part of the entire film. And, if all else fails, live for the 70% of minutes that this gorgeous, gorgeous man appears in:



















Mmmm. Yummy.

Thursday 10 January 2008

Entertainment

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was "To be involved." (The others were: To be more fiscally responsible, To be healthier, To be nicer, and To write in my journal [real one, not heartless electronic version].) Now, while the others are all fairly self explanatory, Being Involved is a multi-faceted resolution which covers many aspects of my life.
At a recent audition, I was subjected to an hour long lecture about the importance of being aware and involved in the various artistic and cultural activities that take place around us every day - to see plays and movies and concerts and read books and hear lectures and to generally to be a well informed and interesting person, so as to better enrich one's mind and therefore create better art. This made perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, while I generally like to think of myself as a well informed and interesting person, the fact is that I have only seen about four movies in the last twelve months and one of those was Bee Movie. What's worse is that when anyone asks me what good movies I've seen/books I've read recently I tend to go completely blank and wind up mumbling something about "Well, I haven't seen it yet, but I heard Elizabeth is meant to be good..."
Thusly, my Be Involved resolution includes, amongst other things, seeing more good movies and reading more good books and seeing plays and other culturally and academically enriching activities - and probably by association, I should give up giving over huge chunks of my time to watching things like Friends and Gray's Anatomy.
So I don't wind up forgetting everything and embarassing myself at the next audition (having to admit to NIDA that I haven't seen a single Australian film all year was NOT an experience I care to repeat, even if I did try to explain that I wasn't IN the country for nine months) I'm going to write it all down. Here. I'll be like my own little Margaret and David.

Wednesday 9 January 2008

2007 - A Year in Review

Things I Learnt in 07
  1. That to love someone and leave them anyway is hard.
  2. That to live your life for someone else's benefit is wrong.
  3. That long haul economy flights are, simply put, slow painful torture that we pay a lot of money for.
  4. That daylight as a source of happiness is not to be underestimated.
  5. That living with strangers is a gamble which does not always pay off.
  6. That the amount of money you spend on your child's education rises in direct proportion to how spoilt, ignorant, boorish, bigoted, poncy and unaware of the real issues in the world they will turn out in the end.
  7. That I was blessed with quite extraordinary friends throughout high school, the likes of which do not always exist in large groups in the real world.
  8. That London is a truly amazing city.
  9. That the Oyster card is a truly amazing invention.
  10. That red wine can give you a TRULY awful hangover.
  11. That family are your greatest blessing and curse.
  12. That who you were friends with in high school is irrelevant.
  13. That a lot of the stuff you thought defined you in high school means nothing to complete strangers.
  14. That children are the greatest source of humour and wisdom.
  15. That if Italy were any more Italian, it would have to explode with the sheer post-modernity of itself.
  16. That I speak with my hands for a reason.
  17. That I am an Italian citizen.
  18. That independence and loneliness are only a frozen pizza away from each other.
  19. That I want more out of my life than mediocrity.
  20. That I will not be deterred despite naysayers.
  21. That I am actually quite proud of Australia, despite its many, many faults.
  22. That MSN is a hugely inadequate medium for communicating emotion. Actually, you would have thought I had learnt that in 2006 but apparently not.
  23. That you can only offer a drowning man a raft - he must grab hold for himself.
  24. That Paris is NOT always fun, OK?
  25. That I love Shakespeare and it's probably just as well he's dead or I would be one of those creepy literary stalker-crush girls.
  26. That all-female workplaces are a health hazard.
  27. That normally reasonable people turn into bizarre monsters when they have children.
  28. That one must confront life, rather than shrink from it.
  29. That a companion makes the most mundane things enjoyable.
  30. That if you want something badly enough, you can ignore any manner of disastrous weather conditions.
  31. That all Scandinavians are cool.
  32. That trains are fabulous places for reading, thinking, talking and eating, but generally NOT for sleeping.
  33. That if Europe were a giant playground, all the cool kids would be in the sandpit, building their own little world.
  34. That you should pack nothing in a suitcase for an overseas trip, as you will merely want to buy doubles of everything you already own, simply because it is from overseas and therefore much cooler.
  35. That I am an emotional spender.
  36. That I am an emotional eater.
  37. That most Australians who one meets in Europe in Summer are twats.
  38. That even when you think you're over it, you're probably not.
  39. That you should SLEEP WITH YOUR FUCKING VALUABLES UNDER YOUR FUCKING PILLOW. For God's sake, how stupid do I want to be?
  40. That Amsterdam is the best place in the world to forget your troubles.
  41. That you can be anyone you want to be.
  42. That true friends will not be fazed by who you become.
  43. That you can know a person five minutes and feel you've known them a lifetime.
  44. That you can know a person for a lifetime and feel you don't know them at all.
  45. That you should reach out to people with whom you have seemingly little in common, BUT
  46. That if you have reached and reached and reached repeatedly over six months and still gotten nothing back...it's probably because you actually do have nothing in common.
  47. That five girls in a room can be fun in a STRICTLY NON-PORNO way.
  48. That six months is long enough for a place to become a home.
  49. That six SECONDS in New York is long enough to decide you want to give up any previous intentions in life and decide to move to some brownstone in Greenwich Village.
  50. That BANKS FUCKING SUCK.
  51. That people in New York are all extras from Friends or Seinfeld or Sex in the City.
  52. That you do not have to like your extended family.
  53. That LA is sort of surreal.
  54. That you can never come home.
  55. That things do not freeze in time, and that people will move on with their lives without you.
  56. That this hurts, even though you know it shouldn't.
  57. That you can put the past behind you and move on.
  58. That dull work and overactive imaginations do not mix.
  59. That when opportunity arises, you must seize it.
  60. That old friendships never die.
  61. That simple pleasures are the best.
  62. That I might possibly have a substance abuse problem...with clothing.
  63. That I want the whole world to be spectacular.
  64. That I believe in the possibility of better things.
  65. That no one can take that away from me.
  66. That you should take true friends' appraisals of your personal faults very seriously.
  67. That Sydney is a beautiful city, with an appalling public transport system.
  68. That it is too easy to fall out of contact with people.
  69. That the term "catching up" is evil and is used as a substitute for having actual, continuous relationship with people you used to see every day.
  70. That when you arrive people will leave.
  71. That with privilege comes responsibility.
  72. That all people are deserving of our respect and hospitality.
  73. That I write too many lists.
  74. That it can only get better from here.

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About Me

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You see, the thing is, I have a lot of thoughts. I think I have more thoughts than the average person. And while you are getting a highly censored version of my thoughts here, I feel like I at least want my trivial musings to have some sort of semi permanent area, where, if necessary, I can return to and admire my own wit and wisdom.