"The Flick" (NT, 17 May)

I went in forewarned by a colleague that this wouldn't be very good, and came out nearly doing what the Guys and Dolls poster promises: dancing on air. This is play I've seen recently that made maximal use of what theaters specifically can do: in this case, make you spend focused time--hours--with people as they do very little while attempting to communicate vast things. Late in the play there is a reflection on social performance--on trying to be and feel a thing by forcing yourself to perform a thing--as profound as anything on this subject I've read or seen.
I've never seen something that so precisely recreated the feel of working with other people at a sort of low-level job, with a mix of lifers and people doing it temporarily while moving on (or thinking they're moving on) to other things: in particular, the way people use culture--and often crap culture--to set and police hierarchies among themselves. There's a smoothly intersectional discussion of race and class that isn't, you know, a Discussion of Race and Class. And the best monologue--the stage-stopping sort of thing where a character talks for five minutes, while an actor prepares something for his YouTube channel, is from Pulp Fiction. The play is willing to let theater itself stick to the quiet and, often, the devastating. I would happily watch this again (might do, even) just to watch the eyes of the actors on each other.
And speaking of theater, might I say how fantastic, how utterly fantastic, NT stagecraft is? This wouldn't have been the play it was without the precisely-recreated lighting of a small suburban theater. I've never seen anything where the stage space just felt like normal life--if anything, the lighting on the audience started to feel stagey. This has been a great season for fans and fanning at the NT: first the African servant in Les Blancs, and now the endless ceiling fans in this, evoking (for me, in their sad way) a scale of time beyond there merely human. The staging reminded me throughout of that much-cited Woolf quote about what our houses are like when we're not in them.

Unrelated notes: there was one of these amazing mansplaney drone types in the audience at interval, doing that confident speaking-from-the-diaphragm thing that they seem to do here. And dudebro was dutifully flattening the piece into its most obvious themes: "economic uncertainty...working classes...post-industrial," that kind of thing. I had the feeling he could have said the same things about anything: Chekov, Maeve Binchy--Super Mario Bros. 3. (Mario the international precariat; the red turtles indigenous labor trod--literally and figuratively--underfoot.) So buoyant were my feelings, thought, that he made me happy for the play's subtlety.