No, still don’t get it…
Whoops.
I booked this on the back of us very much enjoying Eve Leigh’s unusual piece, The Trick, earlier this year at The Bush:
But where The Trick had been unusual and a little puzzling, Janie and I both found Midnight Movie impenetrable.
Here is The Royal Court’s verbiage on the piece.
The trailer also provides some clues:
In many ways the play is in the tradition of dream plays, so it would be wrong to complain about the lack of plot and confusing switches. But this piece seemed, to me, so very disjointed, it was hard to get anything much out of the experience.
It is laudable that Eve Leigh and the Royal Court have tried to produce a piece that specific speaks to people with physical challenges, but the notion that the central male character was substituting internet experience for the physical experiences his body would not allow, really struggled to make that point through the material.
Janie really hated the piece.
I tried to go with the flow but couldn’t get anywhere with it.
It is only 70 minutes long, but it felt like so much longer.
We both had out own physical challenges by the end of the ordeal – those narrow arse-ache chairs had us John-Wayning out of the theatre.
We saw a preview, so there’s a chance that the piece has been tightened a little ahead of press night, but I doubt it.
Early signs from the reviews is that the opacity of the piece shines through, as it were.
A rare miss for us at the Royal Court.