Waste of an afternoon!

Tweet

In normal times, we enjoy live theatre and generally go to a variety of performances, as do our friends. Of course now all that is off and theatres and performing arts generally are in trouble. So it’s nice to provide a bit of support when we can, and of course have a bit of a change ourselves. Some friends kindly bought us a ticket for a ‘Zoom pantomime’ performed live by a theatre company who are well known for their summer performances of Shakespeare outdoors, among other things, which are generally excellent. They booked themselves onto the same show, a 2pm matinee, as well as their parents I think. So at the appointed time we all settled ourselves comfortably for some Christmassy magic. We could see our friends sitting beside their Christmas tree, with the dog and glasses of something. The show was billed as ‘a brand new adaptation with all the storytelling, songs, magic and togetherness that make a Christmas show a tradition worth clinging on to’, so we had hopes of music, jokes, audience participation and all the usual panto fun, even if it was via screens. Well, what can I say! It was probably the most mis-described event I have ever witnessed. The four of us all agreed it was the worst thing we had ever seen, considerably worse than the Zoom nativity show that our local church cobbled together with some primary school children! The first half lasted an hour, after which we were thankful for a 20-minute interval when I fed the chickens their supper (it goes dark very early here) and then made myself an Irish coffee to help us through the second half, another hour. There wasn’t much music, little singing, no comedy and absolutely no audience participation apart from right at the start when they selected a toy held up to the screen to play a part, but it never featured again. The talking parts were slow, with long pauses between actors. It was as if this was the first time they had tried this system - but they had been doing it for weeks already! Little One managed to unobtrusively read a book. The rest of us felt obliged to stick it out, for the sake of our friends because of course they would be able to see us. But half-way through the second half we realised that it was actually more entertaining watching the rest of the audience. Among the 48 or so other screens we could see a cat asleep on a couch, a dog playing, a couple of empty living rooms, a couple of blank screens, some restless toddlers, some rather bemused looking couples who were probably someone’s grandparents, a close-up of one person who must have been trying to do something else on their laptop, or maybe trying to figure out how to leave, a few people slumped over apparently asleep - even one of our friends was represented by an empty chair. After it was over my partner looked up reviews of the show. They were universally positive, all saying how ground-breaking and imaginative it was, and how nice to enable families to experience a show together in this way. I felt bad for our friends, because they had obviously bought the tickets in good faith. I sent an email thanking them, saying that it was a bit different to the usual but it was good to be supporting theatre even under the present circumstances. They haven’t replied so far. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2020.