June 2019 - Ryan Collett

A few West End notes

After what felt like a prolonged theater drought, I’ve been SEEING SOME STUFF finally. Just two plays, though. But I feel like it’s been more, but I think that’s only because they’re both blockbuster plays that feel like more than just two.

The first I saw was All My Sons, which was sadly not anything worth writing home about apart from Sally Field who was expertly being the kind of Sally Field she’s become an icon for. Kudos for that. Otherwise, it’s another kitchen table drama—yes, one of the original kitchen table dramas, but what does that mean in 2019?

Characters stare wistfully out into the audience and comment on the weather in metaphorical terms. There are weary mothers and brutish men. The American Dream is shown, very heavy handedly, to be futile and horrific—a daring idea back in the 40s when the play was first put on, but come on, take a look around. Obviously we still, ~as a society~ need to be told these things today, but the production of this play doesn’t even try to put a new spin on anything. It opens and closes with a kind of zoom-in, zoom-out, world-weary, “This Is America,” in-your-face ploy that comes off with all the subtlety of a high school PowerPoint presentation, and it’s just not a good idea to make me roll my eyes in the first two minutes of the curtain rising.

Gosh I’m being a bit mean. (And there’s no actual curtain in this play—when did these theaters just collectively decide to get rid of curtains? It’s been ages since I’ve seen a show with an actual curtain. Anyway.)

But Sally Field was great! But also, what else could she possibly be? That’s her baseline. Ok, I’ll stop now.

I also saw Rosmersholm, another classic play (maybe lesser known, but by a classic playwright), which was first put on historically even earlier than All My Sons, and explores even darker, more tumultuous themes with more grace. Rosmersholm skips the wambulance (rude again, sorry) of the American Dream (Norwegian in this case?) and cuts right into the essential questions of humanity, religion, politics, and particularly female politics.

Hayley Atwell stars and gives one of the greatest performances I’ve personally ever seen (right up there with Imelda Staunton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). She has a scene at the beginning of act two where she absolutely goes for broke and provoked in me that kind of bubbling, visceral reaction only theater can. She completely floored me and to that I say, go get that Marvel/Disney money sis, as long as it lets you keep doing work like this.

The play itself is bleak—bleaker than A Doll’s House, which I remember reading in college and feeling equal feelings of ooph. Things do threaten to get a bit too melodramatic near the end, but the actors throw themselves so willingly into each probing monologue and existential wail that you can’t help but allow yourself to be carried away with them.

The Natural Order of Things

Another day, another animation project. Actually, it’s more like “another few months” as these things take time! And I work on them on and off, not at all consistently. They’re like long-term sketch pads for little doodles, eventually coming together in some way or another. I get an idea and play with it, then another idea comes along and I play with it, and try to string everything together in a way that can be showcased. They’re drawing lessons more than anything.

I treated this one more like a sketchpad than anything else and decided to keep it that way. It all started with this painting at the Tate. It isn’t much to write home about—it’s very dark and murky and kept in an even darker and murkier room—but for some reason it caught my eye and wanted to use it as the basis for an animation project.

*This is literally as bright and blown out possible.*

I thought the woman in the painting would make for a great animation mostly because her dress covers up nearly all of her body, which would be forgiving enough for animating. After biting off a bit more than I could chew on my last project, I was more non-committal with this one. I kept the rough pencil lines unpolished and the layers uncomplicated so I could focus on just the animation and letting it go where it wanted to go. Sometimes the coloring and cleaning-up lines can take longer than nailing down the actual flow of the animation. Actually, they always take longer.

Cut to my morning routine: swinging through the Waitrose self-checkout queue with whatever I’ve grabbed for breakfast before work, squeezing through the pure concentrated capitalism of fifty self-checkout machines all talking over each other in that insane, disembodied, sub-human voice. I was really struck by the wall of sound one morning and spent the next few days making different recordings of it, holding up my phone and little microphone trying not to look completely out-of-step with all the other 9 to 5ers.

I became obsessed with the different self-checkout voices. I went into deeply weird corners of YouTube to find clearer sound samples. I read about the voice actors who get hired to provide the voices—they remain anonymous because of course. At this point, all I had in terms of the animation was this woman from the painting that I had been playing around with, and now these sound recordings, nothing else. Absolutely no through line, just two things that I had been struck by recently, so I combined them in honestly the most literal, unimaginative way possible: turn the woman into a self-checkout machine! Obviously! And honestly, everything else that happens in the animation is the natural course of events.