Weddings and Fictions
I had a double bill sort of a day. The last bit first…
This production is in the round and for the first time ever I was on the far side of the Dorfman theatre. On a simple, circular, revolving set, the play opens with women getting ready for a wedding, and for a good half hour the chat and laughter (with some pretty good one liners) swirls around as we get to know the three sisters at the heart of this play, a couple of nieces and Aunty Carol (an impressive Lorraine Ashbourne). These woman are close, although Maggie (Lisa McGrillis) has moved away, something Hazel (Lucy Black) is clearly bitter about; and it also appears Aunty Carol has more or less invited herself and her ridiculously big hat. The men only appear later as the wedding gets going, and that feels right in a play about all sorts of things but with a backdrop of a post- mining town where the main work is at a warehouse and the younger generation don't seem to know anything about the miners strike at all. That doesn't stop the history seeping through in the relationship between the two older men who haven't spoken for 30 years. Sylvia (Sinead Matthews) though is marrying Marek, a Polish man on the up, who has managed to make the best of this new world which doesn't recognise the old wounds.
I have been to weddings like this where long held tensions boil over, people drink and eat too much, all ending in tears despite the love. It was all captured pretty well I thought, although I wasn't fully convinced with Marek whose dialogue felt a bit fake. Overall though, this was a properly fun evening where tensions around immigration and the globalised post industrial world are an undercurrent to what is essentially a really well written and performed family drama.
American Fiction
First stop of the day was to the BFI to see American Fiction, one of the films in the running for shiny awards this year. Sharp, funny and cynical about Black representation and the packaging of the Black experience with stereotypical characters, trauma and pain, it asks who gets to decide what is an authentic Black experience and calls out the challenges and choices without being dogmatic about it. Great performances all round and I loved the agent and the film producer, both playing the game and the 'meta-ness' ( I don't think that's a real word!!) of it all. I also thought the weaving in of the family drama, with weddings, funerals, sexual identity and just how to be happy all thrown in together alongside the discussion about racial and cultural politics was really well done. And it’s funny too. I’m not sure it's flashy enough to win the big awards but I enjoyed it a lot and it deserves at least a few shiny statutes.
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