This weekend I was treated to not one, but two nights of live drama. First, this Saturday, there was the three-hour performance of the AMS Emergency Council Meeting, in which the theme of betrayal was emotionally examined in student politics, and pizza was had.
But much more enjoyably, not to mention more artistically, this Sunday I got to see Nicola Cavendish perform the one-woman play Shirley Valentine, to raise money for theatre students. The writing was insightful and hilarious, and so was Cavendish. She has an excellent sense of timing, allowing the audience to laugh at the jokes and sympathize at the conflict.
Like any good work of art, the story had a clear thesis: to enjoy life, not to let it bring you down and lose yourself in the mundane. The protagonist’s journey towards this was touching and universal, and not likely to get dated anytime soon. The play, for me, felt like a female-version of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, another work exploring the same topic of a middle-aged Briton breaking out of their lifeless routine and finding vitality once again.
Cavendish did a great job with the altered routine for the night — the play involves a set with many props to allow the actor to remember the lines as they do the actions. For the stripped-down service performance, most of these were absent; Cavendish had to refer to the script a total of eleven times throughout the play, always doing so with great humour and patience; and in doing so, breaking down the fourth-wall to wonderful effect. For me, the play illustrated what matters with a play — you can pull of forgetting your lines, as long as you have the right rapport with the audience and execute the lines and action with the appropriate timing and emotion.
With a play this great, I was sad I could not help with the fund raising — in the play’s programmes, they included enveloppes for donations. Instead, as a poor undergraduate with an impending exam in partial differential equations, I worked out a solution to the wave equation all over this envelope while I waited for the play to begin. Once, however, the play had started, Cavendish kept my undivided attention.
The play is on for one more night, and I would heartily recommend it. This is a play worth procrastinating on exams for.
