Gothic Nightmare or Surreal Dream?

[dotinthesky]

I went to see The Black Rider - The Casting of the 12 Magic Bullets with Kevin, Joel and two of Joel's friends last night. The only thing I knew about this play was that the music had been composed by Tom Waits, the words came from William Burroughs and the direction from Robert Wilson. And I knew Marianne Faithful was in it.

I did not know that the play was a musical, a surrealistic goth-romp with characters straight out of a demented Charlie Chaplin piece, the music composed by demons who travel the country with their demented carnivals, the costumes made out of something resembling paper, or a futuristic synthetic fibre. The orchestra sat in a pit below the stage, playing the oddest types of instruments. One of the instruments consisted of bowls of glass wet with water, perfurated, which produced an eeiry sound as a man rubbed his fingers on it. Death with a megaphone introduced the play. His megaphone projected light onto his face. Then a giant black box slowly slid to the centre of the stage, opened up, spewed dry-ice, and let Marianne Faithful come to us. I never knew how much I liked the smell of dry-ice.

All the symbols used in the musical had a manic child-like power to them. Scary tree-trunks in a forest became cushions to jump on. A murdering rifle shot birds in the sky that resembled a game in the cheapest funfair. Weddings were performed by zombies. Lovers floated in the sky as they sang about strangling a rose. Madness, Madness, Beautiful Madness.

If you live in London, or near London, you have no excuse to avoid this. The play/musical is on until the middle of June and I highly recommend this to everyone. The cheapest ticket, which I got, is 18 pounds. The great thing is that there really isn't a bad seat - The Barbican is set up in a manner which everyone gets a good view of the stage.

The writer Will Self was sitting near me. I wonder if he was reviewing it for The Independent.

Comments

[saint-narcissus.livejournal.com]

this is an old post of yours, just had to comment though...
i loved this play! i saw it 3times in san francisco, the production came here after the london run you speak of in this post... it was help over in san francisco 4 or 5 weeks. i am lucky i have friends in the box office, it was so incredible! another reason i love living in this city. (oh, i am bored at work this afternoon and decided to read some of your older entries, learn a bit about you etc,,,, hope you are Great today! peace, -david

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I loved it too... I had some friends in America who wanted to see this production (and they lived in California) so it's a shame I didn't know at the time that the production went to San Fran.

I also love going through people's old posts, trying to find out more about them. But hey, I don't have to do that with you since I've been with your journal from day 1! :-)