I appear to be on a one-woman mission to make every young actor hate me…
I don’t understand the appeal of strip clubs.
Ejaculating orange notes for two foot-smelling, badly-carpeted hours, just to watch a woman in bum floss, out of reach, jiggle around to chart hits. Call me old fashioned, but for less money and less moral eczema couldn’t you just go to a normal club, dance with a stranger and, maybe, if she wants to you, dance against her thigh and, eventually, buy her breakfast?
The power balance between those on stage and those paying to watch the stage is a tricky one, in and out of the strip club. A successful comedian told me on Sunday that she would never date someone who approached her after a gig because the status imbalance is immediately off.
But the dynamic I want to talk about here isn’t about sex. It isn’t even necessarily about power. It’s about fun. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis (it’s okay – he’s too dead to object) fun things are funner than unfun ones. And by gawd is there some unfun theatre out there. Harrowing, poignant, affecting, intriguing, scary and clever, sure. But not fun. Which is all well and good – too much cream makes a diabetic, after all.
However, the kind of unfun play that really gets my goiter is that which is so clearly, so unapologetically, so shamelessly more fun for those on stage than those in the audience. Long plays. Indulgent plays. Plays that are little more than a sexually-charged children’s party game with us, the paying audience, playing the patiently bored parents thinking about what we need to pick up for dinner on the way home and if we’ve paid the council tax…. READ THE REST HERE