![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI saw Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking at the Silo some years ago, and really enjoyed it (apart from the nontheatre bit where I had to book 8 tickets from a work phone in a shared office) – it’s a play in which unpleasant things happen to unpleasant people, yes, but it was dynamic and enthusiastic, and the cast (and the script) managed to pull out some amazing moments (it’s a play that’s made me think a lot about the effects of repetition, for instance). So I was keen to see Some Explicit Polaroids, his next play, and although it wasn’t the Silo theatre company, it was still the Silo venue. I have many fond memories of the venue as a theatre space, apart from the bit where the ceilings are way too low, so anything done in the round – which this was – or with the set in the middle involves very bright lights in the audience’s eyeline for the whole play. Oh well.
Some Explicit Polaroids came out in 1999, and is set then, in a London focussed on pleasure, and the denial of anything unpleasant. Nick is just out of prison after a 14 year sentence for nearly killing one of the rich powerful men his former student activist friends despised; now, however, his former friend Helen is a city councillor, working for much smaller changes and trapped in politics. Nick also runs into Nadia, a stripper with a boyfriend (off-stage) who beats her up, but who pretends it isn’t happening and she can control her reality; she’s friends with Tim, who has HIV (controlled on medication), and has just bought Victor (a Russian would-be sex slave) off the internet. And, amongst all this, the man Nick assaulted is trying to track him down.
Strong performances all round, and some very nice moments again – at the start, Helen is getting into her work clothes, while Nick, off-stage but visible to the audience, sprays himself all over thoroughly with a water bottle before arriving and complaining of the rain, a possible deception that plays nicely with his later actions. It does derail a bit in the second half (it’s one act, but there’s a definite shift) – Tim stops taking his medications for rather weak reasons and then dies almost instantly (although this does enable a great post-deathbed handjob sequence), and there are a bit too many coincidental meetings, compared with the first half where what looks initially like coincidence becomes planned. The title's also a lot less crucial than Shopping and Fucking - it relates to Victor, and it's about transient moments and all that, but the Polaroids themselves don't do anything. Still. It's the sort of theatre I used to see a lot of, and it's nice to see some of it again.
Some Explicit Polaroids came out in 1999, and is set then, in a London focussed on pleasure, and the denial of anything unpleasant. Nick is just out of prison after a 14 year sentence for nearly killing one of the rich powerful men his former student activist friends despised; now, however, his former friend Helen is a city councillor, working for much smaller changes and trapped in politics. Nick also runs into Nadia, a stripper with a boyfriend (off-stage) who beats her up, but who pretends it isn’t happening and she can control her reality; she’s friends with Tim, who has HIV (controlled on medication), and has just bought Victor (a Russian would-be sex slave) off the internet. And, amongst all this, the man Nick assaulted is trying to track him down.
Strong performances all round, and some very nice moments again – at the start, Helen is getting into her work clothes, while Nick, off-stage but visible to the audience, sprays himself all over thoroughly with a water bottle before arriving and complaining of the rain, a possible deception that plays nicely with his later actions. It does derail a bit in the second half (it’s one act, but there’s a definite shift) – Tim stops taking his medications for rather weak reasons and then dies almost instantly (although this does enable a great post-deathbed handjob sequence), and there are a bit too many coincidental meetings, compared with the first half where what looks initially like coincidence becomes planned. The title's also a lot less crucial than Shopping and Fucking - it relates to Victor, and it's about transient moments and all that, but the Polaroids themselves don't do anything. Still. It's the sort of theatre I used to see a lot of, and it's nice to see some of it again.
