"Following the White Rabbit" — the Therapeutic Value of a Second Text About the Same Play

A first for me: a second post about the same production. It's closer to a therapeutic act — I can't seem to keep it in, and there's an urgent need to say it. Reciting the same stock phrases about a work's quality feels crude and pointless; it's far more interesting to build something of my own out of it, and in my case let that be a text.

I have a lot of respect for the short form: a tight format stops the maker rambling and forces them onto what matters. Before "Following the White Rabbit," checking the running time, I'll admit I was slightly bored at the prospect of an hour. I didn't expect to still be carrying an anxious, half-hysterical feeling from it the following day — from what I'd seen, or more precisely felt. Everyone sees it differently, and maybe something in me was simply opened that I hadn't noticed before.

It started with the room, as it usually does — genuinely unusual people come to independent theatres; it's largely a deliberate choice in favour of people making theatre out of whatever they have.

I need to work out from time to time why theatre is in my life at all. At the moment I think I come here to talk. Don't misread that — I'm not out to disturb anyone else's evening; unfortunately it's usually the other way round. What matters to me is the conversation with the director and the actors, wanting to know what they make of it, and possibly to argue. Which raises the obvious question of what's wrong with cinema, then. It doesn't have that live current, here and now.

A production doesn't happen unless both sides are invested on that particular night, and that has to be done again every time. At this one, from the Theatre of Non-Normative Plasticity, the conversation did come together, and in places got somewhere.

The form Roma proposed gave me real pain and real pleasure at once — jumping between images, alternating kitsch with a genuinely dramatic story. The characters arrive gradually, and by the finale, when the threads finally meet, it becomes twice as hard to watch.

It's good to notice, with young directors especially, that we've essentially watched the same films and the same plays and listened to the same music, and all of it turns up in the fabric of the production. Knowing how you'll react to obvious fakery, the director leads you deliberately from cheap provocation to something considerably higher, holding the line between vulgarity and actual thought. At first you refuse it and resist the way the action refuses to resolve — and then you see what all that handling of the audience was for.

That's the sweetness of art that tricks you more than once, and leaves you looking foolish at the end of it, in the best possible way.