Warming Up

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Saturday 8th July 2006

I was at the Soho Theatre tonight watching The Bee. It's a brilliant production. Great script, funny and unsettling script and imaginative use of space and props. It's about a businessman whose wife and child are being held hostage by an escaped prisoner, who decides not to play the victim and so holds the criminal's wife and child hostage in return. That's where things turn pretty dark and the pencils start snapping, but the pencils represent something else. Go and see it.
There is some interesting gender reversal as the wronged businessman who discovers his own dark side is played by the amazing Kathryn Hunter and the woman he kidnaps is played by a man, Hideki Noda. It gives a strange over-worldy quality to the production, but after a while you accept that the woman is a man and the man is a woman. So when the woman pretending to be a man rapes the man pretending to be a woman, it works on all kinds of levels.
It gives you a lot to think about. I can't recommend it enough.

I myself did Talking Cock in this same theatre a few years back and it was weird to think that this was the same space. They made it so much their own. Yet as the actors left at the end of the performance they headed out the same door that led to the same dressing rooms that I had been in. Even with that realisation to break the spell it was difficult to comprehend that this was not an apartment in Japan, which is a testament to the good job done. It made me think of all the performers who have shared that dressing room before and after me.The space felt like mine for that three week period, but every fortnight or so it transforms into something else. Maybe sometimes more successfully than others. Anyway....