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Friday October 26, 2018
A Very Very Dark Matter
This play is a distinctly bizarre satire, designed to offend - and it did offend - though not me. I found it very very funny, not to mention dark. But I thought that there was no doubt of it's wholly undisguised points about "great writers", swiftly extended to include any people put on pedestals as historically great figures ("national treasures" "fathers of the nation" etc). Since the literal depiction of Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson (and the source of his stories suggested in this play) were so preposterous as to be laughable, I could not see it as offensive. Thus the critics surprised me by receiving it fairly poorly - perhaps they could not forgive the nature of the exposure.
Johnetta Eula'Mae Ackles as Marjory was astonishingly good even without considering this was her stage debut - and Jim Broadbent as Hans Christian Andersen, and Phil Daniels* as Charles Dickens, are, of course as always, brilliant. [*maybe with the exception of his part in Dr Jekyll and My Hyde!].
This review in the Guardian expresses my thoughts much more clearly (since it's written by a journalist...).
[In the light of later events, this play seems a weird foretelling of the "black lives matter" campaigning of the following years even to the referencing of historically inappropriate statues: ...throughout history, certain voices have gone unheard and the past forgotten so that statues were erected to the author of Belgian brutality, Leopold II...]
Posted by Christina at 11:46 PM. Category: Days Out
