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ivyficAnd now the fourth in the installment of review everything on NT at Home.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Trigger warnings: Unsurprisingly, the play titled Consent talks a lot about rape. Both Antigone and Behind the Beautiful Forevers contain suicide. (OMG SO MANY PLAYS have suicide. It is such a trope of theater tragedies.)
Antigone
Antigone is Antigone. I mean—I studied this play in high school. For those not familiar, it’s the third in the Theban trilogy by Sophocles following Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone is Oedipus’s daughter. The action of the play starts immediately after a battle between Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles, the rightful heir, and Polynices, who raised a rebellion. Both are killed in the battle leaving Creon, Antigone’s uncle (Jocasta’s brother) as king.
At the start of the play, Creon declares that Polynices’ body is to be left unburied and that anyone who performs funeral rites over him is a traitor to the state and to be executed. Antigone defies this order and performs rites over her brother, leading to the conflict between her and Creon, which is also a conflict between Creon’s attempts at establishing authoritarian rule and the generally accepted morality of the time.
The play therefore requires a bit of background. You need to know the events of Oedipus Rex going in, and why Antigone would consider her line and Thebes to be cursed. You also need to know the level of blasphemy involved with leaving the dead unburied. This would be considered disrespectful and wrong now, to leave dead on the battlefield, but to the Greeks this was holy shit bad.
So what I’m saying is, like a lot of classics, the audience is expected to have done some homework, and the individual production is presenting something meant to already be familiar in a new light.
This production stars Chris Eccleston as Creon and Jodie Whitaker as Antigone. Given the fact that Antigone’s meant to be like eighteen, there’s an age mismatch in the casting. They set it in modern dress in something that’s meant to look like Churchill’s war room. It works fairly well—the acting is good if a bit shouty, the directing doesn’t distract. Antigone is one of the more enjoyable ancient plays to me because of the real character growth of Creon. (I remember being given a paper topic from my high school English teacher—why is this play titled Antigone instead of Creon? But I don’t remember his point with that.)
Problem is, I saw an absolutely stunning Japanese language production of Antigone at Park Avenue Armory a few years ago. The set was a pool with islands of rock in it and it leaned heavily on Buddhist imagery, with the dead walking in the water and the living isolated on the rocks. It was so good. So any other production of Antigone at this point pales in comparison.
Consent
This play should be titled “Disingenuous Rhetorical Arguments Used in Defense of Adultery” rather than Consent. It wants to be about consent, but though mentions of rape are present throughout, that’s not the main point of the play.
The action of the play centers around two couples: Kitty and Ed, and Jake and Rachel. At the opening of the play, Rachel has just discovered that Jake has been repeatedly unfaithful to her throughout their marriage. As Kitty and Ed discuss this drama, it reopens old wounds in their own relationship. Kitty sympathizes with Rachel, Ed with Jake. Because Ed was also unfaithful to Kitty in the past, and though they remained together, it’s clear that Kitty never forgave him and never got over it. The events of the play then proceed through Kitty’s actions to make Ed feel the pain that she felt, which ultimately destroys their relationship.
So why is it called consent? Almost everyone in this play is a lawyer, with Ed being a defense attorney and another friend, Tim, the British version of the DA that opposes him in court. The first act intercuts between scenes of interpersonal drama and a court case over a rape in which Tim utterly fails to protect the interests of the rape victim and Ed does all the things defense attorneys are regularly criticized for putting rape victims through in court. And then the victim finds out the two of them are buddies and the whole system is rigged.
Later on, there’s a discussion of marital rape that comes up but—this ends up being besides the point? You could remove that plot point entirely and none of the rest of the play would be affected. When it was introduced, I expected that to become the thing that redefines all the relationships in this group of friends, but it just kind of gets dropped.
So as a drama about adultery and marriages falling apart, this one is cleverly written and well-acted. But if that’s what you’re going for, I’m going to recommend Marriage Story instead. The way this play interweaves a main story about adultery and divorce with side discussions about rape does a real disservice to consent issues. I don’t know why the rape piece is in there at all except to make the play more marketable.
As it says on the tin, this play has an enormous amount of rape discussion. But if what you want is a play that really dives into what consent is, keep looking.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
This is misery porn. Don’t watch this.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is based on the NBA award-winning 2012 bestseller of the same name. Pretty early in this production my eyebrows started going up and I started googling the book. It is, of course, written by a white American woman. And it’s non-fiction.
The action of the story centers around a woman who sets herself on fire and blames her neighbors before she dies of the injuries, leading to the family being destroyed by a fundamentally corrupt justice system concerned solely with bribery and not justice. (In the play, a judge says, “The system works. They [the poor] fight each other instead of fighting us,” which is a little on the nose.)
I tried to verify if this immolation actually happened, but the only articles I can find are about the book.
A lot of things about this narrative strike me as too convenient to be trustworthy. I can’t find any articles discrediting the book, though, so as far as I know, Katherine Boo did spend several years in Mumbai’s Annawadi slum. But this narrative fits into a long tradition of white outsiders writing about the oppression of groups they are not part of for the benefit of other white outsiders. The most charitable interpretation I can give of this book is that Boo, who spoke none of the languages spoken in the slum and talks about her difficulty getting translators to work with her, interpreted what she saw through her own lens. I mean, this book grew out of an article she wrote about the “real” Slumdog Millionaire—the success of this book is a direct result of the popularity of that movie and it has fallen out of public consciousness since then.
I mean—are there no Indian journalists writing about slums? No books we could translate? But of course not—because books like this become best sellers because they so neatly fit our preconceptions.
So yeah. That is the basis of this play. Whose point seems to be to show how unrelentingly miserable the lives of these people are. There are two (arguably three) suicides depicted onstage. There’s a murder by the police. Multiple people get beaten. There’s a lot of screaming. There’s a focus on prejudice and violence between Hindus and Muslims. And everyone EVERYONE is corrupt.
It’s not an easy thing to watch and, since I seriously doubt it’s telling me anything real about the slums of Mumbai, what is the point.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Trigger warnings: Unsurprisingly, the play titled Consent talks a lot about rape. Both Antigone and Behind the Beautiful Forevers contain suicide. (OMG SO MANY PLAYS have suicide. It is such a trope of theater tragedies.)
Antigone
Antigone is Antigone. I mean—I studied this play in high school. For those not familiar, it’s the third in the Theban trilogy by Sophocles following Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone is Oedipus’s daughter. The action of the play starts immediately after a battle between Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles, the rightful heir, and Polynices, who raised a rebellion. Both are killed in the battle leaving Creon, Antigone’s uncle (Jocasta’s brother) as king.
At the start of the play, Creon declares that Polynices’ body is to be left unburied and that anyone who performs funeral rites over him is a traitor to the state and to be executed. Antigone defies this order and performs rites over her brother, leading to the conflict between her and Creon, which is also a conflict between Creon’s attempts at establishing authoritarian rule and the generally accepted morality of the time.
The play therefore requires a bit of background. You need to know the events of Oedipus Rex going in, and why Antigone would consider her line and Thebes to be cursed. You also need to know the level of blasphemy involved with leaving the dead unburied. This would be considered disrespectful and wrong now, to leave dead on the battlefield, but to the Greeks this was holy shit bad.
So what I’m saying is, like a lot of classics, the audience is expected to have done some homework, and the individual production is presenting something meant to already be familiar in a new light.
This production stars Chris Eccleston as Creon and Jodie Whitaker as Antigone. Given the fact that Antigone’s meant to be like eighteen, there’s an age mismatch in the casting. They set it in modern dress in something that’s meant to look like Churchill’s war room. It works fairly well—the acting is good if a bit shouty, the directing doesn’t distract. Antigone is one of the more enjoyable ancient plays to me because of the real character growth of Creon. (I remember being given a paper topic from my high school English teacher—why is this play titled Antigone instead of Creon? But I don’t remember his point with that.)
Problem is, I saw an absolutely stunning Japanese language production of Antigone at Park Avenue Armory a few years ago. The set was a pool with islands of rock in it and it leaned heavily on Buddhist imagery, with the dead walking in the water and the living isolated on the rocks. It was so good. So any other production of Antigone at this point pales in comparison.
Consent
This play should be titled “Disingenuous Rhetorical Arguments Used in Defense of Adultery” rather than Consent. It wants to be about consent, but though mentions of rape are present throughout, that’s not the main point of the play.
The action of the play centers around two couples: Kitty and Ed, and Jake and Rachel. At the opening of the play, Rachel has just discovered that Jake has been repeatedly unfaithful to her throughout their marriage. As Kitty and Ed discuss this drama, it reopens old wounds in their own relationship. Kitty sympathizes with Rachel, Ed with Jake. Because Ed was also unfaithful to Kitty in the past, and though they remained together, it’s clear that Kitty never forgave him and never got over it. The events of the play then proceed through Kitty’s actions to make Ed feel the pain that she felt, which ultimately destroys their relationship.
So why is it called consent? Almost everyone in this play is a lawyer, with Ed being a defense attorney and another friend, Tim, the British version of the DA that opposes him in court. The first act intercuts between scenes of interpersonal drama and a court case over a rape in which Tim utterly fails to protect the interests of the rape victim and Ed does all the things defense attorneys are regularly criticized for putting rape victims through in court. And then the victim finds out the two of them are buddies and the whole system is rigged.
Later on, there’s a discussion of marital rape that comes up but—this ends up being besides the point? You could remove that plot point entirely and none of the rest of the play would be affected. When it was introduced, I expected that to become the thing that redefines all the relationships in this group of friends, but it just kind of gets dropped.
So as a drama about adultery and marriages falling apart, this one is cleverly written and well-acted. But if that’s what you’re going for, I’m going to recommend Marriage Story instead. The way this play interweaves a main story about adultery and divorce with side discussions about rape does a real disservice to consent issues. I don’t know why the rape piece is in there at all except to make the play more marketable.
As it says on the tin, this play has an enormous amount of rape discussion. But if what you want is a play that really dives into what consent is, keep looking.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
This is misery porn. Don’t watch this.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is based on the NBA award-winning 2012 bestseller of the same name. Pretty early in this production my eyebrows started going up and I started googling the book. It is, of course, written by a white American woman. And it’s non-fiction.
The action of the story centers around a woman who sets herself on fire and blames her neighbors before she dies of the injuries, leading to the family being destroyed by a fundamentally corrupt justice system concerned solely with bribery and not justice. (In the play, a judge says, “The system works. They [the poor] fight each other instead of fighting us,” which is a little on the nose.)
I tried to verify if this immolation actually happened, but the only articles I can find are about the book.
A lot of things about this narrative strike me as too convenient to be trustworthy. I can’t find any articles discrediting the book, though, so as far as I know, Katherine Boo did spend several years in Mumbai’s Annawadi slum. But this narrative fits into a long tradition of white outsiders writing about the oppression of groups they are not part of for the benefit of other white outsiders. The most charitable interpretation I can give of this book is that Boo, who spoke none of the languages spoken in the slum and talks about her difficulty getting translators to work with her, interpreted what she saw through her own lens. I mean, this book grew out of an article she wrote about the “real” Slumdog Millionaire—the success of this book is a direct result of the popularity of that movie and it has fallen out of public consciousness since then.
I mean—are there no Indian journalists writing about slums? No books we could translate? But of course not—because books like this become best sellers because they so neatly fit our preconceptions.
So yeah. That is the basis of this play. Whose point seems to be to show how unrelentingly miserable the lives of these people are. There are two (arguably three) suicides depicted onstage. There’s a murder by the police. Multiple people get beaten. There’s a lot of screaming. There’s a focus on prejudice and violence between Hindus and Muslims. And everyone EVERYONE is corrupt.
It’s not an easy thing to watch and, since I seriously doubt it’s telling me anything real about the slums of Mumbai, what is the point.