BIG GOB
People think I know about theatre but, trust me, I really don’t. It turns out that bit on TFI Friday with the floating mouth was based on a Beckett play called Not I. I saw Not I at the Royal Court tonight and it took 8 minutes and 41 seconds. A breakneck stream of consciousness, delivered at the speed of thought, and yet minutely determined by Beckett, who indicated the lengths of pauses with very particular numbers of dots. There was a complete blackout in the auditorium, and then these lips appeared, ticking and clucking and spluttering into life. It was INCREDIBLE.
Fuck knows what it was about. In the Q&A afterwards I asked how important it is that Not I is performed by a woman and everyone on the panel was like DURRR IT’S ABOUT REPRESSION at which point I was like OH YES OF COURSE when, to me, it had been about space and darkness and distance and rhythm.
Vicky Featherstone was chairing, and at one point she asked the audience if they’d felt that the mouth was moving. She indicated with her hands that she meant side to side on the stage but in my mind it was shifting by fucking LIGHT YEARS. It was a teeny weeny tiny little mouth, millimetres from my eyes, and then it was ten times bigger than the sun, but bajillions of millions of miles away.
I’m falling back in love with the arts this week. Estuary started it on Saturday, and Forced Ents have released a Quizoola video today, and OBVIOUSLY payday helps, but I feel so excited right now for all the beautiful stuff and how it makes my head tingle.
I would also like to note that I want Vicky Featherstone to be my big sister so I can go round to her flat and talk about my career and have her GET IT and she can introduce me to her cool (single, hot, male) friends and decant a sample of whatever expensive conditioner she uses and let me borrow her AWESOME GOLD ANKLE BOOTS. We would drink red wine and then go out dancing somewhere cool in East London and when we got chatting to people I would be like “THIS IS VICKY FUCKING FEATHERSTONE! SHE’S MY BIG SISTER YOU KNOW! … YES, WE DO LOOK ALIKE DON’T WE? WE GET THAT ALL THE TIME HA HA HA!! … LOOK AT THESE GOLD BOOTS!”
Sun, Sea and the Isle of Sheppey
My plan yesterday was to go to three exhibitions. I started at the Museum of London Docklands for Estuary and was still there at 5.45pm, having wept three times in the permanent exhibition alone. (Was totally fine until they provided an “area for contemplation” after the Dunkirk bit. Striding purposefully on is more my thing.)
This image, from their new Estuary exhibition, was the thing that made me go in the first place, because it’s like Star Wars-on-sea or something. I finished the first chapter of my dissertation last weekend and, writing about the sublime, all I’ve had in my head has been wide open spaces and stormy weather and THE ENDLESS VOID and all that.
The Thames estuary may as well be the Amazon to me. I’ve never been there. At all. I was at a training course for work this week in Deptford and I think that’s as far out as I’ve gone. The estuary, to me, means Dr Feelgood and that Nicola Barker short story about the jellied eels, although if I’m honest I didn’t really understand it because I have no idea what a jellied eel, y’know, is. But I do love those empty, half-industrial, end-of-the-world landscapes. Like, LOVE them. On Crosby beach near Liverpool, where the Gormley sculptures are, you can look out and see power stations and sewage pipes and stuff, and it seems the Thames estuary isn’t much different. There were two really long canvases by Jock McFadyen in the exhibition which really got that: tufts of grass and litter on long beaches with broken fences and ramshackles industry. One of them had a long row of tiny houses in the distance. The canvases were big, but somehow the scale of the view made them seem so so huuuuuge. The columns on my blog design suddenly seem woefully inadequate.
My other favourite thing was really pretty special. It was an 18 minute video by John Smith (catchy name), called Horizon, and it was just really simple footage of the sea near Margate, taken in loads of different conditions. Every time the image changed there would be this whooshy wave noise and it would go from rain to sunset to lifeboat to birds to big waves to total calm to sailing club to seagulls. I watched it twice through, and then returned again before I went home. My favourite part was where the men on the lifeboat realise they’re being filmed and each quietly looks up and waves at the camera, or maybe it was the fishing boat being followed by about 25 million birds. Or maybe it was the shot with the shaft of light at the back that made a big silvery patch of water. Or maybe it was just the sounds of the sea. I dunno. I was born in the Highlands and lived by the edge of a loch until I was 7 so maybe it comes from my own history. That said though, I just lived in Brighton for 8 months and went to the beach about three times (fucking windy). Who knows. All I can tell you is that it felt like pushing reset. A decompression chamber. Delete browsing history.
Brilliant.
I interrupt my dissertation nightmare to bring you…
…an interactive forest of MUSICAL LASERS.
MUSICAL LASERS.
(My blog design won’t embed YouTube but you should also watch the video. It’s like a big hug.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oRIP_i-TC5o
The installation was made by a collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast (MARSHMALLOW LASER FEAST) and it was in Eindhoven recently. I’ve been to Eindhoven you know. They had nice mint tea but let’s not pretend I saw any musical fucking laser forests.
AMAZING.
Thank fuck for that
I haven’t read any fiction since last summer, and then this week I read Revolutionary Road. The plan had been to get stuck into my dissertation reading on my tube journeys but AS IF there is a place for Slavoj Zizek on the northern line at 8.30am. So I picked a paperback off the shelf on Monday morning and for the past seven days I’ve been living in 1950s Connecticut.
Well, actually, no. I haven’t been living Revolutionary Road, I’ve been living in a palpable sense of relief. Seriously. THANK FUCK my life is good right now, because reading this book when you’re in a difficult place must put you on suicide watch. Richard Yates’s writing is so wonderful, his characters so completely fraught with terror about their decisions, it doesn’t really matter that the decisions they have to make are different to mine. It just matters that they’re terrifying decisions. And each one can go a million different ways.
Everything I’ve seen this week - the show that we’ve been doing at work that I’ve already seen once before, then RomCom by Glen Neath and a piece of writing by Jess Latowicki at Forest Fringe on Friday, then tonight Mies Julie at Riverside Studios - everything has been watched through a veil of Revolutionary Road Relief. I’ve been so fucking grateful that I’ve not become a freedom fighter; not become complacent in a boring, easy, comfy relationship; not been shackled with an urgent need for pretty dresses and kitchen appliances; not been tied to a hometown that offers me nothing. At Mies Julie tonight I was so fucking grateful for my own life and my own directionless decision-making that I actually started the standing ovation. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. It was such a visceral, bleak, can’t-even-breathe performance that it was really tough. Just like reading Revolutionary Road has been this week. Like watching a slow-motion car-crash, constantly believing that there’s an opportunity to change the course of the story but then everything ultimately turning to shit anyway. I’ve been able to read Revolutionary Road in little bits, two or three chapters at a time, depending on how long I’ve had to wait for a Charing Cross train. Getting to my desk at 9.30am has felt like a welcome rest from an emotional battleground. I’ve been able to pause the car-crash to live my life, but the never has the car stopped crashing.
It’s a brilliant, exhausting, ordeal of a book. Totally recommended. Maybe wait a few days before attempting Mies Julie though. I feel like I need a whisky and a dark room.
“My name is Megan and I give a shit about the Turner Prize.”
It’s official. I am now the kind of person who gives a shit about the Turner Prize. It’s caught me by surprise a bit. I’ve been to the last couple of exhibitions, even travelling up to Newcastle for one (the provinces!), and have generally just wandered around trying to decide which artist’s work is the rudest (Hilary Lloyd and Paul Noble for, respectively, buildings that look like in-and-outy penises and big turds drawn in pencil). Then last year Elizabeth Price made a film that honoured the inherent gravitas of the handclap (I was smitten), and, today, I’m suddenly over-joyed and appalled by the 2013 shortlist.
Overjoyed.
Appalled.
Those are give-a-shit kind of words.
My name is Megan and I give a shit about the Turner Prize. Don’t judge me.
Firstly, I’m over-joyed because Tino Sehgal is on the list! These Associations at Tate Modern, possibly my absolute number one theatrical encounter of last year (defo top two), is nominated alongside another thing he did somewhere else, and there is no electricity bill in the world big enough to keep me from those works. The exhibition this year is in Derry - fucking IRELAND - but I’m fucking going and I’m going to spend the whole fucking day there and that’s fucking that. So excited I’m actually trembling a bit. :D
Secondly, I’m appalled because another one of my favourite artists has been nominated, which sounds like a contradiction in terms but THERE IS NO PLACE FOR DAVID SHRIGLEY IN THE TURNER PRIZE. Which is obviously no fault of his own, because his work is intelligent and relevant and unusual, despite his popularity amongst a certain generation of hipster art fans. My problem lies in that he’s also HILARIOUS. I saw the retrospective at the Hayward that he’s been nominated for, and my heart hadn’t been in it because Jeremy Deller’s adjoining retrospective had been so affecting, but I remember there being far too many people there to pontificate over modern society’s ills and not nearly enough who were there simply to have a laugh. David Shrigley makes art to have a laugh to, and I’m not sure I want that sacred headspace soiled with Turner Prize-y contemplation. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good contemplate as much as the next guy, but let’s not try to pretend that the whole point he’s making doesn’t lie right within the dark, dark joke.
LET YOURSELF LAUGH.
Zen and the art of hanging upside-down
I left a show in the interval this afternoon, which is something I haven’t done for years. It might have even been my first non-Shakespeare bail-out. Obviously, leaving halfway through means that I am not entitled to publicly tear strips off it. The second half might’ve been incredible. But it put me in a bad mood. My Saturdays are precious now, and it pisses me off that it took me 2 hours to travel across London for 50 minutes of shit. By the time I got home again I had ranted myself into a fury.
I had another show booked for this evening but, frankly, I just wanted to stomp around the house swearing about having my intelligence offended by drama school twats. If the theatre wasn’t a 15 minute walk away, that’s probably what I would’ve done.
So, Not Until We Are Lost by Ockham’s Razor. I tell you what, it calmed me right down. Sadly, I’ve come home with a bit of a crick in my neck, as aerial performances STILL don’t come with fully reclining dentist’s chairs, but it was a calming, graceful, playful, kinda twinkly experience. Most of the musical accompaniment came from a single harpist, but there was a choir dispersed through the audience too, so every now and again you’d just get this warm hum of a cappella vocals swirling around too. And there was a beautiful moment when all the performers climbed inside a perspex box and were joined by a single white moth which had fluttered towards the light. It was lovely. They were stalwart professionals of course, but everyone near me was whispering “Oooh look at that moth…”
My desire to stomp and swear has been, if not diffused, at least postponed for a while.
“I let him cumberbatch on my facade.”
Everything I’d heard or read about Narrative before tonight had told me that it was a fragmented, thread-free collection of disjointed black comedy vignettes. I’d seen a picture of a man with a glove puppet, which gave me a horrific Avenue Q flashback, but if I’m honest with myself, I think that historically, the Royal Court has been rather lacking in glove puppets.
It’s interesting, that phrase. “If I’m honest.” “If I’m honest with myself.” Narrative isn’t a fragmented, thread-free collection of disjointed comedy vignettes. It’s an expertly-crafted story about misunderstandings. About lying to yourself. It’s a bit sketch comedy at times, a bit Mighty Boosh, a bit Brass Eye, with its talk of anuses and therapy, its superhero catchphrases and “I let him cumberbatch on my facade”, but every scene was just teeming with this awful, tragic breakdown of communication.. The best bit of the whole thing might well have been the dance of complete over-joyed BLEAKNESS performed when one character goes to an audition. Leaping, yelling desperation. I wanted to put the poor guy out of his misery. Like, with the edge of a shovel or something.
Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed Narrative so much tonight. My mood has been just the right shade of black. Last week I told a boy to go fuck himself, so obviously this week we’ve had to do the whole tiresome “Why can’t we be friends?” “Because I hate you for hurting me” thing. It struck me tonight, in Narrative, watching a man spit in his mate’s tea, and a girl accidentally-on-purpose murder her best friend, and another one call three different people her “soulmate”, that we’re all just making shit up all the time. Not lying, you understand, just fabricating realities for ourselves. Living protective fantasies. Trying to THINK things better.
I might get a glove puppet.
#quizoola24
So I woke up this morning and, thanks to twitter, I realised that today was the 24 hour Quizoola show at SPILL, from Forced Entertainments, and one of the first things that came into my head was “now there’s a show that was R&D’d in Guantanamo.” Seriously. TWENTY FOUR HOURS. I can’t concentrate on one thing for 24 minutes.
So I got out of bed and did a day of stuff. Payed a cheque in and went to a show, dyed my hair, watched Jonathon Ross. And still people on twitter were talking about Quizoola. I had a glass of wine by this point.
SPILL were streaming the live feed on their website.
A few people tweeted the following: “What is an ideal world?” “It’s like the Ideal Home Show but bigger.”
Forced Ents are the only company whose show I genuinely feared I would fall asleep in the middle of, but I couldn’t NOT look at this feed. For one thing, live webcasts almost never work. They’re an internet car crash.
But the last 90 minutes of Quizoola have been one of the most compelling things I’ve ever seen. It was funny, frivolous, personal, engaging, unexpected, human.
“What is a hole?” “Have you ever dug a hole?”
“Did Lenin and John Lennon ever meet?”
“How much money is in your bank account?”
“Which living person do you love the most?”
“I was an ill child. I had some heart troubles. I was in hospital but I could walk and everything. So they sent me for an x-ray and they said ‘can you walk there on your own?’ and I said ‘yeah’ but I got in the lift and I must’ve gone to the wrong place because i got in the lift but I ended up in a sort of basement. I walked out of the lift but had this, this shaky thing. There was a woman who asked me if I was okay, and I said ‘no I’m not really’ so she was a bit panicky I suppose and she got me a wheelchair and took me to have my x-ray. They told me to sit on the floor. When you’re having a panic attack you should sit on the floor and hold onto something. That helps.”
That’s all I’m cpaable of blogging right now. I accidentally got drunk and have been overwhelmed by the power of the simplest idea. Time matters. Things get bigger. They grow.
I wish it was still happening. I wish it was one of life’s constants. I wish that when life was getting on top of you and you were panicking, you could sit on the floor, hold onto something and switch your phone to Quizoola mode to listen to some questions about life.
Yet another selfish and superficial judgement on some high-concept live art
SPILL is on in London at the moment, and I can’t go to much of it because WOAH REAL LIFE, but I booked for the Salon Project way back when it was first announced because, frankly, all theatre should start with someone doing your hair for you.
Basically, The Salon Project is the recreation of a 19th century French salon, teeming with glamorous intellectuals in fancy frocks and pearls. There were a series of talks and artsy montages (yay nakedness!) but they play around with era a lot; with technology, with costume, with speakers. On Wednesday, we were treated to a presentation on the future of food (including fried beetle tasting - like small rocks marinated in semen) and a discussion about what Freud’s study of cocaine means for modern neuroscience.
To be honest though, my guess is that 90% of the attendees were just there to gawp at themselves in the mirror (me included). There were some amazing frocks. Of course, when I arrived at my dresser, she presented me not with a floor length corseted gown that would make my arse go all Jessica Rabbit, but with a fur-sleeved cape and FUCKING TURBAN. It was, shall we say, a striking look, but I did feel like stamping my feet and shouting “I want big hair like all the pretty girls!” And my shoes hurt. And my beads rattled too much when I moved. And I was too hot. But other than that everything was JUST FINE.
Low quality photo of me in a turban (I’m growing my eyebrows back at the moment so FUCK OFF):
Offered without comment - The dude with the forks from 1999 superhero ‘comedy’, Mystery Men:
Hmmm.
Goodnight sweetheart
It doesn’t really matter that Lundahl and Seitl’s feels like a bit of fluff. It doesn’t really matter that it isn’t really about anything. It doesn’t really matter that the show they’re currently doing at the Steinway and Sons piano place on Marylebone Lane is basically the same show they made for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2011. They still make me feel all snuggly, like I’ve had a bath and drunk my Ovaltine and now Mummy is going to sing the bedtime song.
It’s just so simple and gentle and lovely. The blindfold can be a liberating thing. Somebody holds your hand while somebody else whispers sweet nothings in your headphones. You put your hand out and feel your way around an unseeable mirror while a stranger mimics your own movements by stroking your back. I would pay twice the ticket cost just for the back stroking.
The old man with the eyes is back, joined this time by an amazing concert pianist and, once your blindfold is removed, there are clever tricks of the light that make Steinway Hall grow and move and disappear. It’s lovely, fluffy nonsense. I want to do it every night at 10pm and have it finish with someone tucking me into bed and kissing my forehead.
I wish this had been in Light Show
It’s by Vinicius Silva and it’s currently installed in a gallery in Rio. Those are light bulbs made to look like rain drops. ART BONER.
That unnamed thing that comes after love
I’ve seen a couple of things recently that haven’t really hit the spot with me. Ring at BAC made out like it was going to be scary and then wasn’t, Money The Gameshow was so gameshowy that the serious bits were lost. In hindsight, even Port only made me warm and fuzzy because of its geography. I had started to worry that I was hitting one of those yeah whatevs phases of my career as an audience member, where nothing gets me off for a few months.
And then today I saw Mydidae.
It’s a proper drama about serious things performed in a tiny room with real nakedness. I’m pretty certain there was some fake wee but other than that it was all REAL and LIVE and CLOSE and IMPORTANT. And I was absolutely spellbound. It’s so easy to forget, when you’re as fickle and sensationalist as I am, that all you really need is a wonderful script and some incredible actors. Mydidae had all of that, even before anyone took their clothes off. Two people and one relationship and all the history and closeness and pain that lives in it. It was an hour and a quarter of the most compelling drama I think I’ve ever seen. And yes I know I don’t go to very many drama-y plays but that’s still saying something so shut up. Seriously. So good.
I don’t want to say too much about the story because the show is one long surprise and I want to keep it that way, but it’s fair to say that it left me reeling a bit. (I don’t even know what that means really. Is it a fishing thing? It definitely left me feeling a bit spinny and out of control, so maybe it is a fishing thing.)
I walked over the bridge to the Hayward in a bit of a trance, but was slowly rebuilt into a human being by THIS BEAUTIFUL THING by Leo Villareal (that’s a person, not a football team).
It’s called Cylinder II, the first exhibit in Light Show, and you can’t tell from the photo but it moves like the most gorgeous cascade of rain and fireworks and shooting stars and neurons and waterfalls and big eyes and arrows and sucky growy things and tidal waves and sci-fi iris scanners and it’s just the most engaging, the most calming thing I’ve seen in a very long time. I returned to it after looking round the rest of the exhibition and heard a young couple having the most intense post-break-up talk, about how she wants to go travelling and it’s important that she does it on her own and how he just wants her to be happy and would never hold her back and about how they both thought that the other was the person they had always wanted to be with until it turned out that they didn’t.
Every so often one of them would say “Shall we keep moving?” and the other would reply “No, it’s nice here, looking at this together.”
Quite angry really
We’ve been looking at Judith Butler at uni today, the woman who wrote about gender as a sliding scale which society maaaaan tries to make one thing or another. I think feminism is the same. We are all on the feminism scale somewhere but we’re forced to choose between the binary opposites of Spearmint Rhino and Greenham Common.
I am a feminist who believes in equality in all areas of life but maintains that the pay gap is a consequence of biology rather than misogyny. I’m somewhere around the 70% mark, but a few things have happened recently that have seen me creep up the scale a couple of notches.
I was groped on the tube (more like tickled really) so I followed the dickhead up the escalators and screamed bloody murder in Victoria station until he was arrested and charged. (Pleaded guilty, got a 12 month community order, won’t be daft enough to mess with me again.)
I was approached on the walk home from work, late at night, and propositioned in the street. Again, the guy got such a fucking mouthful of abuse off me that he may still be wondering what just happened.
And now the third thing, which has become more of a saga really. It’s such a minor, normal, everyday thing for women that I almost feel bad for writing about it after the relative severity of events 1 and 2, but I am fucking WELL ANGRY RIGHT NOW, and this feels more appropriate than spouting another torrent of abuse.
There is a harmless, intelligent man on my course who, over recent months, has made it clear that he would like to be my boyfriend. This has been very flattering, and I told him “thanks but no thanks” in the nicest way possible, despite a worrying bit of sleuthing from him in order to get my home address for a Valentine’s card. There are only four people on my course, so I was concerned that things might be awkward if we never spoke again and I’ve continued to be friendly towards him in lectures every week. I really wanted the whole thing to be forgotten but the text messages kept coming, including the offer of living in his house rent-free, comments about how I’m “spiky like a porcupine” and numerous “hey what you up to” shit. I’ve ignored every single text for weeks now, but today was my last day in uni and I was friendly towards him as normal. Then on the walk home (him, me, and other friend Ruth) I said goodbye because I was heading into the shop for some bananas and a Chomp. He lent in for a kiss/hug combo and I quickly turned into the shop and said YEAH ANYWAY BYE THEN.
This, of course, isn’t that shocking. I’m not adverse to a bit of friend hugging, but it’s a delicate balance. I have friends who don’t hug and I respect that, and to be honest I’m only a hugger if it’s one of about 10 people in the world that I’m close to or rarely get to see. I turned down Mat’s hug with a bit of an eyeroll and awkward shuffle, but then I got some texts. Firstly from Ruth, clearly pissing herself: “Hahahaaa he doesn’t understand why you didn’t let him kiss you!” She thinks it’s hilarious that he even tried, after everything that’s happened. And then Mat, firstly saying “Surely I’m not that repulsive?” and then, five minutes later (like I said, I don’t reply to him anymore) “All the best for the future anyway” which could be simple well-wishing, or it could be the text of a MARDY FUCKING BABY.
I don’t feel threatened by Mat like I did with the tube guy or the dickhead on my walk home. But his attitude says that the only reason I could possibly not want to kiss him is because he was somehow “repulsive”. That the default setting is one of entitlement. That the starting point of any relationship is kissing and you just get demoted a level for every repulsive act. Judith Butler would probably say this was evidence of social conditioning, that Mat is simply following the rules he has been taught over the years. I just want to ask him how many more text messages I need to ignore before he decides a kiss is inappropriate. 10? 20? 100?
I NEVER EVER HAVE TO SEE HIM AGAIN.
And breathe.
Location: with you wherever you go until you die
I’ve written about going home before on this blog, not least of all when I saw Manchester Lines in the summer. That was a transitional, worrying time for me, which I think you can hear in my writing. I’m going through a transitional time now too, but I have the good fortune of having a job and a house and an affordable future lined up. So, it was with a very different head on my shoulders that I saw Port yesterday.
I’m from Macclesfield, which is about half an hour from Stockport; its smaller, more middle-class cousin. My Dad grew up in Stockport though, and the road my Grandma lived on was name-checked in the show. There were little recognisable details, about the Pennine Way, the A6, the viaduct, the navy parka with orange lining, and swearing northern teenagers (if you think I have a foul mouth now, you should’ve heard me when I was 14), but it wasn’t any nod to geography or cheap market stall coat that made Port affect me the way it did; it was the bigger things.
There was a story bouncing round twitter this week, about the guy who originally recorded the famous “mind the gap” announcement for the London Underground. Apparently its been reinstated at Embankment because the man’s widow used to go there to hear his voice. Obviously you should never trust anything you read on twitter, but I can understand that story because the comfort I draw from the flat vowels of the South Manchester accent is like a warm embrace. It makes me do a big “aaaahhh” exhale. My voice doesn’t really sound like that. It’s a bit posher I guess. I say things like “summut”, but I say them as a Cheshire girl would; a Cheshire girl who went to a good school. But those South Manchester voices were all around me all the time, and to hear them for 2+ hours on a National Theatre stage was like a big hug.
The lead character, Rachel (Kate O’Flynn - who was in every scene and was amazing and played a time-span of, like, fifteen years or something), came from a family much more dysfunctional than mine, and she had much more shit to deal with in her life than I’ve ever had, but there was a scene near the end that I saw myself in so completely. Rachel has returned to Stockport after running off to York when her abusive marriage broke down. She got chatting with her old flame, the one that got away. Since yesterday afternoon I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it was the affected me so much about the scene. For a while at least I’d put it down to the use of Bookends by Alfie at the end, but with hindsight (check me out, actually thinking about things before spaffing nonsense onto the internet) I think it was all to do with the way Rachel feels about going home. She’s sad that things are different, that she’s different, that times have changed, but, if anything, she loves the special places from her history more passionately than she really understands. That’s what made me revisit that blog post about Manchester from last summer. It’s almost painful returning to the places that made you, even though their influence seems to be growing in absentia. The last thing you ever want to do is move back though. God, the thought is unbearable…
Moving away from home is so weird. Places are powerful things. Even fucking Stockport, and that’s is a right shithole.
The only thing that could improve Book Of Mormon
I don’t go to many musicals. I’m too cynical. Oh, and cheap. I’m too cheap. But I went to Book Of Mormon tonight because Team America is my Star Wars.
It was completely and utterly wonderful in a way that made me think “I don’t trust this. It’s too perfect. The human race has evolved to a dangerous point now. Philip K Dick saw this coming.”
So, striving for self-preservation in the face of imminent social meltdown, I’ve spent the whole journey back to Brighton trying to think of something - anything - that was wrong with it. Y’know, like in Bladerunner.
And I’ve got it.
THERE WAS NO QUEEN LATIFAH.
I may not have seen many musicals on stage, but in my last year at uni in Leicester our telly nearly packed up due to severe Chicago-exhaustion. My housemates gave me an extensive course in the modern musical and the main lesson I took from it was that Latifah is not in nearly enough of them.
Chicago. Latifah. Amazing.
Hairspray. Latifah. INCREDIBLE.
Mamma Mia. No Latifah. Total bollocks.
Chorus Line. No Latifah. Had to turn it off.
With this in mind, I am obviously concerned that Book Of Mormon will completely bomb on the West End with Matt Stone and Trey Parker never working again. I simply could not bear this. So, I have created a quick and easy template with which you can add a little bit of Latifah to your Book Of Mormon experience.
STEP 1: Click HERE to download proper, human-sized Latifah template, and print.
STEP 2: Reinforce Queen Latifah by gluing her to some card. The back of a cereal box works well.
STEP 3: Following the dotted line printed around Queen Latifah’s face, carefully cut out your mask. Ask a grown-up to help you with the fiddly eye holes.
STEP 4: Attach elastic to Queen Latifah’s ears. You might need to pierce her cheek because she only has one ear in this image.
STEP 5: Take your seat in the auditorium for The Book Of Mormon.
STEP 6: As the band plays the intro, make your companion put the Queen Latifah mask on.
STEP 7: Glance over at your newly-Latifahed friend/lover/+1 at regular intervals during the performance.
Et voila etc.
