Social problems and tangled thinking make victims of us all. Part 3

Part three: too close for comfort

Finally, I went to see last night, two plays written by someone I met once at a party. At the party, we both were tipsy: I frustrated with the limitations parenthood has placed upon me, she in fear of a future and in thrall to her past. In the cab going home, she told me everything about her difficult life.Her strained relationship with her mother,her estranged father, her tangled sex life, and fears for her future. I sympathised. I know what it is to be that I sympathised. I know what it is to be that girl. To feel so judged and judgemental you wordvomit into the lap of a stranger in the hope they might identify with you, or at the very least, listen. I did. I couldn’t help but.

I too am drawn to the confessional, a need to expunge, excuse, bare my soul, the genre of literary striptease that Sylvia Plath made her own. I too have a troubled background, have made mistakes, seek validation and look for love in all the wrong places.  So when she invited me to see her new play, I felt enough sense of maternal concern to make me want to go along.

So I say this in the kindest possible way. I’m not really in a position to judge, and I hold myself up for criticism everyday with my blog, so I also know what it feels like to not get the reaction you want.

You’ll have to bear with me in any case, as the last time I reviewed fringe theatre was when I was Arts Editor of my student newspaper, and I didn’t have THAT much time for it then. I only got the job because my bezzie mate was editor, in my first experience of the nepotistic world of journalism. These days, I’m more into psychology, philosophy and social equality than performance artists shitting paint balls from their vaginas, but please, if that’s up your alley, don’t let me put you off.

 Writing for What Do You Expect? theatre company’s debut play, 25, performing at the Selkirk Pub in Tooting Broadway for the next few nights as part of the Wandsworth Arts Festival, she speaks for a generation. But it’s a troubled, muddled generation who need, in short, to grow up: a generation of slutshamers and facebullies who engage in the very behaviour they speak out against online, having reckless sex and posting vulnerable, needy, self-obsessed posts online. It is, in fact, a generation with whom I can identify, one who is quite right to be angry at forces beyond our control: forces that tempted us with costly, but pointless higher education with little hope of securing a job, and with accumulating debts exacerbated by the demands of a social life forced upon us by the media. Forces that fluffed up our ego, before cutting us down to size; that systematically glamourised and cheapened sex; that gave us recourse for the consequences but judged us when we took advantage.

I understand it all, but in this grotesque parody of what life is like for a directionless young adult, cut adrift from a society who has never made them feel welcome, was still excruciating to watch. First Jones bares her soul, then her body as she gets ready for yet another boozy night out, her tale of emotional abandonment, hard drinking of cheap white wine, reckless sex, abortion pills, shame and the search for validation is hard to swallow. Although it bears testament to a society where responsibility is passed down to the lowest common denominator, and the vulnerable are despised.

I simultaneously empathised with, but found myself rejecting a performance that once I may have recognised in myself, but this probably says more about me that I’m comfortable with. If I’ve learned anything with time, it’s that asking the world to forgive you is a sign that really you just need to forgive yourself.

The second play, would madame like a line with her blowdry was better, in an audience of friends and acquaintances, for being distanced from the author. It was too long, but well cast, with bright eyed and attractive professional actors grappling with the same troubling themes of blame, victimhood, abandonment and abuse. The projected future of what may have happened to the baby of the first play, had it been born, it was simultaneously mawkish and crude with an unlikely happy ending. In questioning the motivations of each character, the audience sensed that the writer had developed empathy beyond her own circumstances. Yet it was hard, given the late hour, length of performance and naivety with which the characters were drawn, as an outsider, to much care.

My companion – a friend of the author, whose party it was where I met her – said it all in his in summary of the evening: “she really needs to kill her darlings,” a literary allusion about cutting down on prose that seemed particularly apt for this morality tale of tangled ideals about sex, abortion and parenthood. I would go further. She, like us all, bless her, probably just needs to get some help. I would add, given her behaviour since I chose to publish this blog, what did you expect?

But the help we all must get, unfortunately, starts with helping ourselves. Which it has to be said, isn’t easy in a society that traps us all circular thinking, a maze from which it is all too hard to escape in a world that places short term solutions and easy fixes above long term stability and learning to love yourself.