The Antipodes - Dorfman

It's unusual; I have been wondering if Circle level might be the optimum viewing angle for this one ..

I am loving the positive feedback for this on the thread so far!

Also, weirdest question... Am I the only person who finds evenings at the theatre where things go slightly wrong (such as actors forgetting their lines) absolutely fantastic, in terms of experience?

Two of the times that I went to see Churchill's "Glass. Kill..." things have gone slightly wrong (yes, I sure know how to pick my evenings at the theatre!): on one evening, Tom Mothersdale mixed up his lines twice, both in "Kill" and in "Imp"; during the other, Toby Jones forgot his line (he literally just stood there, uttering an extended "So..." when it was his turn to speak, with a long pause). I'd noticed because I'd already seen the play and also bought the text and read it beforehand, don't think most of the audience did, but watching them think quickly and saving the scenes before it became too obvious ("Kill" was clearly handled by Mothersdale alone, superbly, but in "Imp" him and Jones came to each other's rescue) was absolutely beautiful. I was once seeing a production involving a gun that failed to go off on that particular evening (also a play I'd seen before), and the actress on stage handled it marvellously - even if the play itself wasn't memorable (which, luckily, it was) I would have remembered the evening for that scene alone.

I mean, I'm sure if I was the person on stage I would probably absolutely hate these moments (making mistakes in front of a full auditorium probably isn't comfortable), but watching them from the audience just makes me appreciate more the team effort that goes into putting a production together and making sure it appears flawless night after night, and to admire the actors more for handling it so brilliantly. We all make mistakes. (Also, it's a good reminder of why I love revisiting great productions and seeing them grow and change. I'd do it much more often if I could.)


Or perhaps it is just me? 

Had a fabulous time - another Annie Baker play with long awkward silences, allusions to the supernatural, and several moments treading a massive tightrope between black humour and being horrified. From my seat in the circle I could see a lot of the audience: some were in fits of laughter, others fairly shocked, and a handful looking bored out of their minds. A lady in the foyer afterwards said it was ‘completely pathetic’!

Personally - I really enjoyed myself, with a stand-out performance from Conleth Hill (wouldn’t he make an excellent Tr*mp?!), and the two female actors.

I saw this yesterday and really enjoyed it - I had high hopes after John, which I loved, and I wasn't disappointed. I was a bit worried about the two hours running time, but it never felt long, despite the silences and the way conversations often slowed down.

There was one instance where one actor forgot his lines and I didn't even realize that had happened until a few minutes later, because in that moment it felt completely in character for this man to pick up a bit of outside office conversation and immediately reuse it in his corporate creative nonsense speech.

What most stood out to me was her way of handling the dynamics of the room - it felt at times almost claustrophobic to be a witness to all the microagressions that come with being the only woman in a work environment like that.

foxa , looking forward to reading your impressions!

I managed to catch the last rush ticket for the press night, so I'm going next week, and am incredibly excited about it!

Will write more, but I did like it. In fact, I liked the first hour immensely, but then thought it lost its mojo a bit.

However, the most newsworthy thing is that for the first time ever I heard someone actually shout 'Is there a doctor in the house.' Hadley Fraser launched into a speech and then saw something in the audience. He said 'we have to stop the show' and the stage manager ran out. The house lights came up and there was some agitation SR Pit. Anyway the call for a doctor went out, two ran forward and a man, after a short delay, was helped out. A guy near us said he thought someone else had taken ill upstairs as well and there was at least one leaver. So a bit eventful.

The stricken audience member looked very poorly at one point, but then was able to stand up and take a swig of water and walk out - so hope he's okay.

Sightlines - we were in the slightly raised side pit area, Row L - nearer the central pit rather than at the far end of the stage (The American couple next to us said - 'we're not looking at the stage' and I saw their point in that if they didn't turn their heads they were just looking at the audience.) But they weren't actually bad seats at all. The actor we had the least good view of in the beginning was Sinead Matthew, but she was skillful at moving around so it wasn't a big problem and Conleth Hill did sometimes get stuck behind someone. I loved Matthew's character.

I was fascinated by the opening when they begin telling their stories. From where we were sitting I could see Fiasyo Akinade and Hadley Fraser's reactions the best and they were both fantastic.

Baker's dialogue is superb - sometimes so light, well-observed, empathetic, funny. The way she explores the power politics of the writers' room with its rules, egos and desire to please is superb. For the first hour, I thought, 'This may be the favourite of all her plays' but it lacked the warmth and the deepening of relationships, particularly of The Flick. But I love her work - I think I need to buy the playscript - how does she do it?

Didn't happen for me. I hate to say this but I experienced it as a middle class writer struggling for a decent idea, who isn't prepared to go into the world to find them. Imo, stories worth telling aren't found around writing rooms, they are in soulless Amazon warehouses, in 5am cleaning jobs, in 1am hotel work, in taxicabs - a thousand places that aren't rooms filled with bottled water. 'Grotesque' grows from 'new normal'.

Maybe she knows that, maybe there is more humour - even parody; the chicken story and the 'cancelled' Danny suggested more dimension, but if it did it was left hanging and wasn't explored.

Found it mono - monotone, monotonous. And the little trips on wheels, the disembodiment virtual reality segment, the seat choreography didn't paper over that.

These are desperate times, the USA more than most, and there are a million important, vital stories to be told. Want 'grotesque'? Go and write about the families, the kids separated from their parents at the US border  - tell those human stories FFS. Opioids, the tent cites outside every US town.

Yes, towards the end Eleanor retrieves the completed knitted jumper from inside the pile of boxes and puts it on.

Annie Baker's plays are as much ABOUT storytelling, as they ARE storytelling, so in the spirit of Annie Baker, I'll continue your story.

I was there Friday night, and the two who answered the stage manager's call were not doctors, but dentists. I was sitting next to them, and they told me that they initially hesitated to get up because they're not "doctors," but since they had relevant training, compassion demanded they help. The patient had fallen unconscious, with his eyes open, but recovered quickly, and was able to walk out on his own two feet, so the dentists felt he'd be fine. A Doctor acquaintance did in fact also leap to his feet to help, but he was seated much further away, so by the time he got to the stage manager, everything was already in hand. He too felt the patient would likely be fine given the speed of recovery.

Anyway, I absolutely loved this play about storytelling, but I suspect it will never be as appealing to a large audience as "Circle Mirror Transformation" or "The Flick," or even "The Aliens, for genre reasons.

Spoilers follow. . .

(Since I really love Annie Baker's work, I'll frame my discussion of this work in context with some of Baker's other works. Don't read on if you don't want to hear anything about those works). . .

Though Annie Baker eschews genre, and generally focuses on conversations and characters, sets and silences, over plot, her most appealing plays have had a buddy formula hidden inside them, a suggestion that community elevates human beings. With "John" and now this play, Baker ditches the buddy formula, and thus ditches the most feel-good aspect of her work.

With the proviso that I know nothing about her first play, which hasn't been staged here, nor do I know anything about "Nocturama," which she hasn't allowed anyone to stage, I will suggest that 3 rules hold for the five Baker plays that have been staged here:

(1) They are about storytelling;
(2) The Set for each evokes Storytelling, being a Place of Stories;
(3) They are naturalistic reworkings of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."

In "The Aliens," the Set is a JK Rowling style coffee shop (the kind of place she wrote Harry Potter), where an unsuccessful writer and unsuccessful songwriter inspire a young workaholic with their stories about creating stories: their community makes for a warm play;

In "Circle Mirror Transformation," the Set is an Amateur Dramatics Class, in which the characters learn about each other, by acting out and telling, the stories of other classmates: not only do we feel the warmth of the class growing, through stories and communing, but also Baker sneaks in a romance, so we get a double whammy of warmth from both the buddy genre AND the romance genre;

In "The Flick," the Set is a Cinema, where after the movie audience devour movie stories, ushers commune and tell more stories, about the stories they have seen on screen, as well as stories about themselves: here we get warmth-injections from a buddy genre bromance, two competing romances, AND the romantic comedy genre as well.

My point is that in these 3 plays, Annie Baker transposes the lonely figures, of Vladimir and Estragon, in "Waiting for Godot" into more real, more recognisable, characters and worlds, and then adds liberal doses of genre-feel-good which makes audiences and critics enjoy themselves, and disposed to rate the plays more highly. I myself rated "Circle Mirror Transformation" and "The Flick" 5 stars, because I was delighted by the warmth of community and genre-plotting, which washed away the taste of the underlying Beckettian loneliness and futility. Baker's warmth can be seen as an amplification of the more muted warmth, of community, that Vladimir and Estragon feel for each other, their bulwark against the void.

By contrast to the above three works, I feel "John" and "The Antipodes" ditch the warmth, which is the reason I find them harder to warm to.

In "John," the Set is a Motel filled with ghostly stories, of Gettysburg, and much besides. It is owned by a storytelling gossip, who seems to control the storytelling of the play, manipulating space and time by opening stage curtains and winding clocks, and her strange friend, so powerful in the realm of this story that she can even interrupt the audience's interval to spin us a story. The protagonists seek solace through telling each other stories, even as stories all around them consume them. The only genre warmth Baker offers us in this cold world is the bond between the Motel owner and her mysterious friend. For this reason, I didn't immediately like "John" as much as Baker's previous plays.

In "The Antipodies," the Set is an actual Writer's Room, the most related to storytelling of all her Sets. We still get Baker mainstays such as characters discussing storytelling, and telling each other stories about themselves, but it feels the most awful it has ever felt in all her plays, because it's not fun any more: it's work, it's oppressive and it's exhausting. This feels like Annie Baker having a Francis Fukuyama moment: announcing not so much the end of History but the end of storytelling.

It's deeper than that, though, as Baker does not suggest that storytelling is useless, rather that the process of storytelling we are witnessing in this Writer's Room is useless. Baker herself alludes to many riveting stories occurring OUTSIDE the room: from what's going on with the weather, to what's going on at Sandy's house, to what amazing store does Imogen Doel buy her outfits from? - and we are desperate for these stories, but frustrated by their elusiveness. And when stories get interesting INSIDE the room, for example, when Stuart McQuarrie's Danny 2 tells us about an experience with a chicken - and McQuarrie's acting is so brilliantly layered that he makes us not only believe in Danny 2's visceral memories and emotions regarding the chicken, but also believe in the emotions Danny 2 feels about about telling the story about the chicken to an audience - credit is not given by the writer's room: good storytelling is not rewarded.

So if Baker is having a Fukuyama moment, it is about the diminished value of storytelling as entertainment created in writer's rooms, not the intrinsic value of stories, which the writer's room ignores.

In "Waiting for Godot" terms, writer's room boss, Sandy, and his all powerful boss, Max (a disembodied voice speaking like God(ot) from the ceiling) are less like Vladimir or Estragon, more like the bullying Pozzo, and the writers' room denizens are their hapless servants, like Lucky is to Pozzo. In Beckett's play, Pozzo demanded that Lucky "dance" and "think" to entertain him and his friends, and here, Max and sandy demand their servants think and write: and in both cases, the result is unilluminating, because the process is flawed.

Anyway, I did have a Billington moment, when I watched this play, when I wished Baker would write about something else that I would prefer she write about, namely how powerful storytelling is, and how easily abused, given that we exist in a world of fake news, a world where Machiavellian storytelling maestros, like Dominic Cummings, can tell the most powerful and most emotive stories, stories that have the power to change all our worlds. I resented her for denigrating storytelling itself by focusing so narrowly on exhausted writers in a writer's room.

But then I realised, it's not for me to tell her what story to write, and the story she did write has not let me go since Friday.

The story Baker seems to actually want to tell feels Bunuelian, where, like in "The Exterminating Angel" or "the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," the writers' roles trap their thoughts to such a degree that they feel imprisoned. It's fascinating.

In addition to McQuarrie, who is phenomenal, I loved Hadley Fraser for channeling the essence of a normal everyday Joe, someone everyone will feel is utterly reasonable, such that he becomes an avatar for the audience; I loved Conleth Hill's Showrunner, the perfect Beckettian Pozzo, obsessed with his own story, ignorant of others bar their use to him, and I loved Fisayo Akinade's immense story, a version of the Greatest Story Ever Told! That said, everyone was good in this.

All in all, 4 and a half stars, cos this work is immense, but I still wish Annie Baker would write what I want her to write, and I also wish she'd throw in some genre comfort food to make me feel good, like she used to, lol!

Interesting post Steve. Maybe that's part of my issue with it: if that's her thesis, despair or mojo-loss or anhedonia or whatever it was that was going on here, it just doesn't chime with me.

I must agree. Although: the whole scenario was a bit like being in my office. A lot of ideas, but nothing really done with it and in the end the a lot of time wasted. Frustrating. But maybe that is the point of it?

What a fabulous ensemble cast, but there talent is wasted in this. And as the staging is very bad - restricted view from most of the seats, you cannot even really enjoy watching them.

I was also in on Friday and a lot of people were falling asleep and my friend even witnessed some snoring. 

I liked the time theories most, but they were always going nowhere.  I wished myself watching Dark on Netflix again intstead.