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Post by Deleted on Apr 3, 2016 15:02:38 GMT
I reckon 'air conditioning' consists of opening a fire exit... Anyone have a rough running time? I can't find it on their website? I think it was about 1 hour 50 minutes-ish with an interval. I seem to recall being out by about 9.30. |
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Post by Phantom of London on Apr 3, 2016 15:35:20 GMT
I managed to catch the 9:39 train from Charing Cross last night.
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Post by vdcni on Apr 4, 2016 15:45:29 GMT
I have tickets for this next Wednesday 13th. Would anyone have tickets for another day that they wouldn't mind swapping. Something has come up that day that I absolutely can't miss.
Thanks
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Post by alnoor on Apr 9, 2016 9:41:41 GMT
Can't make it to today's matinee.
One ticket will be available in the returns queue, if any one is interested
Thanks
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Post by mjh on Apr 11, 2016 17:25:31 GMT
Have a ticket for Saturday 23rd April 2016 7.30pm that I can no longer use - anyone want to switch for another night?
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Post by vickster51 on Apr 14, 2016 22:37:37 GMT
Just extended until 14th May. Tickets for the extra week on sale now.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2016 8:55:25 GMT
Additional opportunity to see James Norton in his pants (if you are so inclined!)
I saw this last Saturday and thought it was really engaging and interesting. Both Norton and Fleetwood are excellent and the space allows for a really claustrophobic tense atmosphere. And an itchy one!
I didn't miss the nudity (as discussed above) and if I didn't know it was supposed to be there I wouldn't have thought about it. All suitably tense regardless. But I'm still interested in hearing how it might have been staged in other productions and whether there are perhaps any changes to text/staging without the nudity.
Have I mentioned how much I love Kate Fleetwood? I mean she scares the life out of me, but in a good way.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2016 16:47:25 GMT
I've read in Twitter that people think there are actual bugs and insects in this play?! Is this true?!
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Post by demelza on Apr 17, 2016 21:13:14 GMT
I've read in Twitter that people think there are actual bugs and insects in this play?! Is this true?! Really? Like I get that as the audience you kinda of begin to doubt if they are just imagining it or not but I thought that it was quite obvious that the bugs aren't real (Is this where I've completely missed the mark??) |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 7:36:12 GMT
I'm wondering if these people on Twitter have actually stated believing this, or if they've just posted slightly hyperbolic responses and had them misinterpreted.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 7:37:40 GMT
I've read in Twitter that people think there are actual bugs and insects in this play?! Is this true?! Really? Like I get that as the audience you kinda of begin to doubt if they are just imagining it or not but I thought that it was quite obvious that the bugs aren't real (Is this where I've completely missed the mark??) I haven't actually seen the play yet, just read on twitter. What actually happens regarding to bugs? |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 8:53:04 GMT
There are no real bugs in the play (I can't vouch for the entire lack of bugs in Found 111 as a whole but that's another story...)
But no physical bugs exist, I don't want to spoil the play if you're going to see it though but let's say things are to be taken more psychologically speaking than literally.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 9:08:42 GMT
Underwear? Wrong. There's a reason they have to strip off. To not do it undercuts the play. The bugs should have performed nude. To not strip off their underwear, it undercuts the play. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 9:26:49 GMT
Underwear? Wrong. There's a reason they have to strip off. To not do it undercuts the play. The bugs should have performed nude. To not strip off their underwear, it undercuts the play. Back in the day the Lord Chamberlain would have had something to say about naked bugs... |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 15:33:43 GMT
There are no real bugs in the play (I can't vouch for the entire lack of bugs in Found 111 as a whole but that's another story...) But no physical bugs exist, I don't want to spoil the play if you're going to see it though but let's say things are to be taken more psychologically speaking than literally. Oh okay thank you. I'm not going to see the play, it sounds very confusing! Not my cup of tea but it has lots of people talking so I wondered if real bugs were used or not and their meaning |
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Post by mallardo on Apr 18, 2016 15:40:53 GMT
"Bug" has a double meaning.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2016 15:50:46 GMT
"Bug" has a double meaning. ... but not as good as "Game" which I nominate for Best Title Ever. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2016 7:29:10 GMT
Ah ok then! For the benefit of anyone who hasn't seen it/doesn't want to know the details spoilers be here... {Spoiler - click to view}
The bugs are a psychological manifestation from a form of (someone correct me if I'm wrong) paranoid schizophrenia type disorder and/or PTSD. Having escaped from a military hospital James Norton's character is convinced that the room/his body are covered in bugs. This escalates from simply being attacked by Bugs because the army wants him to be, to them being a form of tracking/weaponry. He pulls Kate Fleetwood's character into his dellusion as well, and by the end they are both convinced they are being used as a vessel for these bugs as part of an army/government conspiracy.
It's far more nuanced and complex than that but that's the gist of the bug's role. |
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Post by mallardo on May 14, 2016 18:13:11 GMT
I finally saw this on its last day and enjoyed it with reservations. James Norton was very good in a very difficult role and Kate Fleetwood was even better. But the play didn't quite explode (figuratively and literally) in the final scene - the raison d'etre of the piece - in the way that it should. Much rearranging of the action has been done in order to, I believe, accomodate the venue. Playing it in this intimate space with rows of spectators on every side, almost inside the action, is a huge inhibitor.
The plot is stood on its head in the play's last moments and it needs to be staged and played in the most extreme way, to mirror that fact. Here it's all too controlled - as it has to be. The actors do their best but they never achieve the emotional frenzy of the original staging - the one that's in the text.
Incidentally, EmiCardiff, I respectfully disagree with your take on the plot, SPOILERED above. It closes tonight so I think I can say this.
The whole point of the play (for me and, perhaps for me only) is that the apparently mad bug fixation of Peter (Norton's character) turns out, in the aforementioned last moments, to be accurate and TRUE! The retrospective connections worked out by Peter and Agnes in their wonderful final scene explain everything. If that's not the case, if they are simply lunatics spinning a fantasy, tell me who ordered the pizza.
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Post by Steve on May 14, 2016 21:57:34 GMT
The whole point of the play (for me and, perhaps for me only) is that the apparently mad bug fixation of Peter (Norton's character) turns out, in the aforementioned last moments, to be accurate and TRUE! The retrospective connections worked out by Peter and Agnes in their wonderful final scene explain everything. If that's not the case, if they are simply lunatics spinning a fantasy, tell me who ordered the pizza. Mallardo, I love the idea of a post-mortem discussion lol. Spoilers follow. . . I agree your conclusion is one possible interpretation, and that Letts specifically leaves this option open to us. This would mean that Lloyd was kidnapped as part of the same nefarious plot, that the two main characters have been manipulated to meet, and that Tim McVeigh and Jim Jones are decent people, sorely maligned victims of the same terrible scheme. What I love about this is that Letts turns us into conspiracy nuts by allowing us to entertain this, since the conspiracy would have to be the most scientifically advanced and wide-ranging scheme since the dawn of time lol! I don't accept this solution, as I refuse to let the conspiracy nut inside myself out as a matter of principle lol. For example, is it easier to believe that Jim Jones was a good guy, or is it easier to believe the pizza was ordered by Jerry, who fancied eating it with his ex-wife after the Doctor dragged Peter away? Is it easier to believe that that a nefarious organisation that is all-encompassing in it's power hires a ridiculously inept and unprepared Doctor to retrieve Peter, or is it easier to believe the pizza was intended for the adjacent room? But there is another reason that I opt for the alternative that Peter suffers from paranoid delusions. Time and again, Agnes doesn't see the bugs and then she does. If Peter is paranoid, the reason she sees the bugs is that she has so completely transferred her love for her tragically lost child to Peter, that she wills herself into the same delusional state he is. That's profound and moving, and says something for the way humans need each other. That's a play that resonates with me on a deep human level. Desperate love and human need for connection transform the mind. The conspiracy solution suggests that the reason she didn't see the bugs, and then she does, is simply that she didn't look closely enough the first time, which is banal. Ultimately, I think Letts wants it both ways. He wants to show how love is so powerful that it's absence makes us crazy, and he also wants to show that simple building blocks, such as an unexplained pizza being misdelivered, can be fodder for conspiracy theories that explain them away. I would imagine that there is a religion/science analogy to the conspiracy explanation/paranoid delusion explanations, in that religious explanations for life are more complete and more dubious, whereas scientific ones are less complete, but more reliable.  |
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Post by mallardo on May 15, 2016 5:07:11 GMT
Yes, Letts does want it both ways and the play is very carefully written so that that's the case. I agree that both interpretations can be valid.
But I also believe in the adage that a conspiracy theory story ONLY works if the theory turns out to be true. Otherwise what have you got? A deluded individual who turns out in the end to be... a deluded individual. Where's the drama in that?
To me Bug, as a play, depends on the Big Switch at the end. Peter is portrayed as a strange but sensitive and highly intelligent man. Much of what he says about himself and his history is validated by Dr. Sweet, himself, of course, an equivocal figure. Peter is never caught in a lie.
Dr. Sweet is only "inept" because he fails. He was sent in first to try for a peaceful solution, a not unknown tactic. But the helicopters are circling overhead and someone is trying to break the door down. I do not believe that that someone is Goss and I do not believe that Goss has anything to do with the pizza. If it was him they would have recognized his voice and they do not. As for a pizza "misdelivery", is that really a possibility in such a tightly plotted piece?
Yes, the linking of Jim Jones and Timothy McVeigh to the conspiracy is pretty far out and may just be Tracy Letts having some fun with history but, in the context of this story, I have to see it as true. I have to see everything Peter says as true. That "nefarious organization" is the US government and who can doubt that anything is possible with that bunch? The examples Peter cites - the LSD trials, the Tuskegee experiments - are as horrific as the Bug conspiracy and they are certifiably true.
Perhaps we have a cultural gap here. I, as an American, may be more inclined to believe in conspiracy tales and I must acknowledge that. The unresolved political assassinations of the 60s still resonate.
But, even so, I simply don't see Letts writing a play in which everything we thought in act one turns out to be exactly true in act two. What would be the point of that? I can't believe he was interested in simply writing a study in blue collar paranoia. The paranoia has to pay off - and it does. And the play works because of it. |
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Post by Steve on May 15, 2016 9:44:38 GMT
But I also believe in the adage that a conspiracy theory story ONLY works if the theory turns out to be true. Otherwise what have you got? A deluded individual who turns out in the end to be... a deluded individual. Where's the drama in that?
Dr. Sweet is only "inept" because he fails. He was sent in first to try for a peaceful solution, a not unknown tactic. But the helicopters are circling overhead and someone is trying to break the door down. I do not believe that that someone is Goss and I do not believe that Goss has anything to do with the pizza. If it was him they would have recognized his voice and they do not. As for a pizza "misdelivery", is that really a possibility in such a tightly plotted piece?
Perhaps we have a cultural gap here. I, as an American, may be more inclined to believe in conspiracy tales and I must acknowledge that. The unresolved political assassinations of the 60s still resonate.
But, even so, I simply don't see Letts writing a play in which everything we thought in act one turns out to be exactly true in act two. What would be the point of that? I can't believe he was interested in simply writing a study in blue collar paranoia. The paranoia has to pay off - and it does. And the play works because of it.
On a trivial note, I do believe that Jerry could have called the pizza guy, and simply hasn't yet arrived to pick it up, due to Dominos' super-fast deliveries lol. I also think that the men busting in could be the 6 strong team of muscle, accompanied by police, that generally accompany psychiatrists dealing with deranged patients. However, I would agree that a meta-explanation of the play favours your interpretation, in that if we judge the story on how it is being told, the expectation of a confounding twist, our sense that act 2 is redundant if there isn't a pay off, then the conspiracy being true is that pay off. Also, we Brits are perfectly susceptible to conspiracy theories: the deeply broken Mohammed Fayed perpetually raging about motorbikes that flash bright lights deliberately in driver's faces, about the Fiat Uno that clipped Diana's car, about the mysterious death of the driver of the Fiat, about a mouthy Princess and an inconvenient potential sibling for a future King, have left 38 percent of us convinced that Diana's death was not an accident. I don't know what to think. But I do think that the conspiracy theory in this play is simply too massive and too technically far out to be credible, I think Letts knows that, and I think Letts deliberately instigates the meta-explanation of this play, as well as deliberately leaves unexplained certain facts, such as the pizza delivery guy not having been seen to be called, in order to prove the point about how our brains like to join up the dots of our lives to give them meaning. That is, I think, the real pay off of this play, that conspiracy theorists are no different to any of us, in the most important way, that they, like us, are just searching for meaning. And Letts suggests that the search for meaning is so all-encompassing that it can lead to a celebratory double suicide. This last point is particularly profound, in an age of supposedly "inexplicable" acts of terrorism, since it is the overarching explanation for all of it. The more I think about this play, the more I like it. I definitely prefer it to the overwrought August Osage County and the cosy Superior Donuts (though I actually like those plays too). |
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Post by mallardo on May 15, 2016 10:58:53 GMT
Steve, you're more of a student of human behaviour than I am. I'm more of a nuts and bolts guy who, yes, favours "meta-explanations" and tries to determine the motives of the creator. So we come at this from different angles.
What we agree on is that Letts must have had all of the above (both of our takes) in mind when he wrote Bug. In my earlier remarks I questioned whether he would write a play that didn't have a plot reversal as a pay off but, to retreat slightly, a scenario in which that plot reversal is simply a strong possibility would also get the job done. Obviously the play worked for both of us even though we disagree as to exactly what happened. Perhaps Letts himself never made a final decision as to the ultimate truth of the piece but worked it out so meticulously that it could go either way. But, honestly, that kind of authorial neutrality feels unreal to me.
I don't think the massiveness of Bug's conspiracy theory is a factor here. There's a sci fi element to it that doesn't require deep credibility - it works within the world of the play and that's enough.
Where I have difficulty countering your argument is in the spiritual implication, the "search for meaning" aspect. I have to acknowledge that it's there and is, in fact, the emotional heart of the piece. But I don't think it changes things vis a vis the plot. Again, I have to revert to my default position - what was the author's intention? Was this the main thrust of the piece for him, to weave this complex web of a plot around two sad and possibly delusional characters in order to demonstrate their need for some sort of explanation - any sort of explanation - of their existence?
It seems a long way to go to accomplish that end. But I'd have to say it's possible. So I'm conceding ground, slightly.
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Post by foxa on May 15, 2016 18:00:26 GMT
Can I just pipe in here to say I didn't even notice the issue with the pizza ;-)
Okay, play on...
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Post by mallardo on May 15, 2016 18:23:57 GMT
Can I just pipe in here to say I didn't even notice the issue with the pizza ;-) Okay, play on...
Ha! But you saw it a while ago, foxa, and I saw it yesterday so I have an advantage. It's not the kind of detail I would necessarily remember either.
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