"Marys Seacole"
May. 28th, 2022 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losKaty and I went out with my PoCo scholar friend Samira to "Marys Seacole" at the Donmar last Tuesday. Some other friends of Samira's with similar academic/writing interests were there, but the pub we went to after (no interval) was rather noisy, so I didn't get a great chance to catch their names.
The general consensus was that the play was thematically rich (labour, feminism, immigration, childcare, elder care, end of life care, economics and the interplay of race with all the aforementioned issues--not to mention war, the usage of historical figures and imperial geopolitics), but didn't necessarily pull its strands together to great effect. In part perhaps the problem is that the play was, I believe, written by a Caribbean-American playwright, for an American context. The Donmar chose to re-stage several of those scenes in an English context, and while that's extremely resonant for the NHS and not necessarily a poor choice at all in terms of communication with the audience, it's not without friction. Did the terrorism through-line coalesce well in the discussion of imperialism? Was the re-echoing of dialogue near the climax over-done? Who was the intended audience, and what was their intended relation to this material? Is it a didactic work, and if so, what's the actionable take-away? Should the play have pulled its focus tighter? We really weren't sure. It's a bit fucked, though, and none of the writers and subject-specialists at the table (all women, and all but one of whom was also an immigrant) had a clear idea of how to fix it.
The use of different registers and era-variations of patois was interesting, reminding me of the work I afforded to learning to understand spoken Shakespeare when I was younger simply by asking me to perform a similar process for less prestige-coded forms of the language.
(Also I don't think you do have to buy your husband a sex-worker, what the fuck. Straight people are wild.)
The general consensus was that the play was thematically rich (labour, feminism, immigration, childcare, elder care, end of life care, economics and the interplay of race with all the aforementioned issues--not to mention war, the usage of historical figures and imperial geopolitics), but didn't necessarily pull its strands together to great effect. In part perhaps the problem is that the play was, I believe, written by a Caribbean-American playwright, for an American context. The Donmar chose to re-stage several of those scenes in an English context, and while that's extremely resonant for the NHS and not necessarily a poor choice at all in terms of communication with the audience, it's not without friction. Did the terrorism through-line coalesce well in the discussion of imperialism? Was the re-echoing of dialogue near the climax over-done? Who was the intended audience, and what was their intended relation to this material? Is it a didactic work, and if so, what's the actionable take-away? Should the play have pulled its focus tighter? We really weren't sure. It's a bit fucked, though, and none of the writers and subject-specialists at the table (all women, and all but one of whom was also an immigrant) had a clear idea of how to fix it.
The use of different registers and era-variations of patois was interesting, reminding me of the work I afforded to learning to understand spoken Shakespeare when I was younger simply by asking me to perform a similar process for less prestige-coded forms of the language.
(Also I don't think you do have to buy your husband a sex-worker, what the fuck. Straight people are wild.)
