Last night I went to the Crescent Theatre to watch two plays out of their series called Fourplay. I like the Crescent, and have been there to see scores of plays over the years. Some of them have been incredibly good, some of them have been incredibly bad, but because it’s amateur theatre it’s cheaper than anywhere else in Birmingham, and that means you can take a bit more of a risk with what you go to see. I wouldn’t pay £30 for a night at the Rep unless I knew I was really going to like it. Fourplay, if you haven’t heard of it, is not as rude as it sounds, but an opportunity for four new directors to present four short, one-act plays. You can go to see the plays in groups of twos, and so it was that last night I dragged my boyfriend along to the theare to see The Lesson and The Bald Prima Donna, both plays by Eugene Ionesco.

I confess that I normally probably wouldn’t have bothered going, but in this instance I was keen to because The Lesson was being directed by my friend Colin I didn’t know very much about the play before I went, only that Ionesco was French/Romanian, and his plays were supposed to be “absurdist”, whatever that means. I thought it might mean they were going to be amusing, but it later transpired that wasn’t quite it.

Bearing in mind that at this point I was yet to see The Bald Prima Donna, The Lesson was one of the strangest plays I have seen in my life! The main character is a nutty professor who has students coming to his house for private tuition. A young girl arrives to study for some sort of doctorate, but is unable to grasp the basics of arithmetic. The professor’s maid runs periodically in and out, warning him not to start of arithmetic, and then when he moves on to linguistics and philology, gets visibly distressed and starts issuing dire warnings.

The professor talks nonsense about languages at great length, becoming increasingly heated. Meanwhile the student becomes increasingly weakened, complaining of bad toothache. Things rise to a crescendo as the professor asks her to pronounce “knife” in various languages. There follows a frightening scene in which he chases her around the room, a struggle and then… she is dead.

The maid reappears and sort of ticks the Professor off, implying this has happened several times before. The professor seems quite distressed, and defends himself weakly. The maid agrees to help him dispose of the body, and they drag it from the room. As they do so, the bell rings and the next student arrives.

It was a bizarre play, but in a weird way it was entertaining. As promised, the word Esperanto crept into it at one point There were some pretty cool sound effects, and the set was also good; over by the door was a coat stand absolutely full of coats. The significance didn’t dawn on me until fairly near the end of play; they were the coats of all the students who had come in for a lesson and never reemerged The actors were also all incredibly good; I didn’t notice a single fluffed line and that was particularly impressive in the case of the Professor, who had so much nonsense to say. I confess to being a little unsure as to what directors do, but whatever it is I’m sure that Colin did it very well

The second play… erm, there’s not a nice way to say this so I’ll just come out with it. I hated it. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with the acting or the directing. There was an attractive set and appropriate sound effects. I just loathed the script.

I don’t even know how to describe it. An English couple sat in a living room and had an inane conversation, where every five minutes they contradicted what they had said before. Another couple come to visit them and sit on the sofa for far too long, pretending that they don’t know one another and remarking on what an extraordinary coincidence it is that they both appear to live in the same house. There are random interruptions from a maid and a fireman, before everyone starts to talk gibberish and prance about the room. The End.

It might have been interesting for five minutes, but the hour and a half it appeared to go on for was pure torture. I began to feel sick and claustrophobic. I was so bored I wanted to scream and throw my umbrella at the stage so that they’d stop and I could run out. It would have been too obvious and disrespectful in the theatre we were in to leave before the end, and so I felt trapped. I contemplated fainting so someone would carry me out. At the end, I did something I have never done before, and refused to clap.

That said, everyone else in the theatre seemed to be having a good time, and clapped enthusiastically. They were laughing at what I thought were poor jokes. I don’t know if that was because they really found them funny or because they thought it was intellectual to do so.

When I got home, I looked the play up on the web to try to understand it a bit better. Apparently it was inspired when Ionesco was learning English and wanted to poke fun at the inane conversations the people were having in the textbooks. That helped me make a little more sense of it; it is true that in language textbooks, people talk to their nearest and dearest as if they have never met them before, telling them their age etc. The point was, I feel, overlaboured.

And if the piece is supposed to make a point about the inanity of small talk in general, or the shallowness of society, or whatever… erm, all I can say is that Oscar Wilde made the same point in the Importance of Being Earnest, and he managed to be funny with it

Perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough or cultured enough to enjoy this genre. I don’t know, but I reckon it will be a long time before I get my other half in a theatre again

Tags: crescent, fourplay, ionesco, theatre

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Holidays and outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.