Once in a Lifetime (Young Vic, 19 Dember)

What is it with farce timing in London? Over and over again I see things where you can feel the script sort of fighting the production--funny lines go by without a pause or anyone acknowledging them; unfunny things get pauses. I wonder if I'm maybe just too sitcom-y in my tastes for comedy. And yet, oh, when this production gets going later on, it is powerfully funny. It just takes a while to get there. Honestly the accents in the first scene sounded off; either they got better, or I grew into them.

This was better as a physical production--striking and lovely--than overall as an acted comedy. One of the main female characters, a columnist, was more reliably funny for their costumes than for anything she said. This is a fine and intricate script, and those intricacies often got missed; I would have traded two or three of the scenes that whizz by across the stage for a tad more rehearsal among the actors. I was roaring with laughter towards the end, but for the first 1/3 everything felt a bit off. I'm probably over-sensitive about American accents, but there was more too it than that: as with middling Shakespeare, neither actors nor production really attacked the script.

This play was an influence over the Cohen Brothers, and here the influence of the Cohens sort of comes back at the play. Only the chilliness they manage in their films doesn't really work on stage: the off rhythms of dialogue in their movies are deliberately off, while here the production just didn't really grasp them. Again as with Shakespeare, there is just a basic debt to language that needed to be paid before anything else could happen; I roared in parts, but was disappointed at least half the time.

Sleeping Beauty (Hackney Empire, 15 December)

I took someone who had never seen panto before--who had no idea what they were doing--which is I think pretty much the ideal way to interrogate one's own reason for going to something like this. I mean I'm literally a theatre historian; this is one of the last living nineteenth-century forms, and I'm sort of professionally required to go to things like this. My friend lasted 'til interval; I had a really fantastic time all the way through. It was great watching professionals who were completely committed to fucking around on stage do so. Plus everything was (to my admittedly sort of middle-of-the-road judgment) completely, laudably progressive: Sleeping Beauty is revived by a kiss from the dame, then straps it on and rescues her prince; there's a sweet dragon-on-magical-fairy-type romance. As a unit of this kind of entertainment, it was entirely satisfying.

Love (NT, 15 December)

I'm genuinely of two minds about this, with no sense of how to reconcile them--and that's something, right? Firstly, whatever I think, it is absolutely the sort of thing the National Theatre should be doing. I thought a lot about last year's Here We Go: a basically futile, occasionally almost stupid theatrical risk that absolutely needed to be taken. Assembling us all around the Dorfman stage, this put most of us inside a social housing center, recreated down to the munge on the skylights. We were down admidst the foodbank-level desperation of the characters themselves. In fact I think for the no-longer-gonna-even-complain-about-it theatre audience--white, older, middle class--on this Thursday afternoon, I assume this play sounded as a clarion shudder: dear Christ, don't let it be me. In this regard putting what read imprecisely to me as a middle-class family front and center was a masterstroke: they meant that an audience from another class absolutely could not look away. I thought of something I had not thought of in eons, a video game level from the early 1990s: Claustrophobopolis. We were all stuck here, sharing this situation.

And yet, what to say: we weren't. And although there was nothing titilating about anything, this was poverty porn in the very particular scene of pornography's focus on small bits of unadorned quotidian action. I was a bit dismayed with my fellow audience members' gasps at one character using Fairy liquid to wash his mother's hair--all the more so in light of the Syrian and Sudanese characters who all-too-briefly appeared onstage. Indeed, these were the happiest characters in the play--or, at least, those visibly keeping it together the best.

And yet and yet and yet. All of this had to be in there--I admired the gestures. That the play was about how bad it is in Britain, while acknowledging it's worse elsewhere--the play did that. That the play made clear that middle-class people have it better than others, even in shelter--the play did that. That the lives of poor people are inexpressible sad--I dunno. I have a hard time commenting. That's not a reason not to try. Even the play's last gesture--people in the theatre sobbed--gave just the right amount of edge, of inflection, to the play's realism: no, you really have to fucking care about these people, it said, in exactly the right way.

The fact is that right now theatre is predominantly an elite form, and the lack of social housing is an un-elite problem. But this play knew that; indeed it bounced up against the bars of that like a wild thing. This playwright's earlier zero-hours play, Beyond Caring, annoyed me, particularly with its reliance on unexpected sex between two of the characters to provide whatever that was meant to provide. This worked. It really did some of those things I mark my students down for saying in essays about plays without offering supporting evidence: appealed to a common humanity, implicated the audience in what it was displaying. I feel clenched and pissy for murmuring the word problematic to myself as I wandered out. And yet and yet and yet.