Thought I would add my 2 cents!

Have had a few interesting discussion about the play and thought I might chip in. It’s been quite interesting to see the way the play has divided audiences. I know there have been a lot of positive critical responses but I know a lot of people who saw the show and found it confusing/alienating/pretentious etc

I saw the show on the opening preview night which was quite some time ago and I think what Tom has done is a real achievement, full of a stark power and beauty. I remember V.S. Naipaul writing that all he wanted was for his books to echo and live on in the mind of the reader…

It’s been a few weeks since I saw the play but images, ideas and recollections of the richness of language are still with me.

I think what Tom is doing is quite clear – and at the same time open for us as an audience to leap into the fold and make of it what we will, consider his central image of the girl as a lamb/fawn/sacrifice/innocent…. and absent from the stage (form and meaning combining?)

I think Tom’s play really tussles with the idea/question of how a daughter can be sacrificed in a meaningful, rich and nuanced way. In the original text Iphigenia is literally replaced by a deer. (This myth/fable has some interesting parallels to the story of Isaac being sacrificed Abraham…) Why is the girl seen as a sacrifice? In what sense is the daughter a sacrifice?

That’s where we come in as the audience to engage and make what we will

I had a chat with Tom about the play and he wrote the following

“This question of the sacrifice is even more concentrated in terms of the ‘Agamemnon/father’ figure. He gets confused about his relationship with his daughter as well as how society sees it and instead of taking real responsibility he kills the lamb.

Or you could also say that in killing the lamb he stops seeing his daughter as pure innocence and starts to see her as a real person.”

So the act of killing the lamb becomes in some sense about the ‘Agamemnon/father’ character confronting the reality of a cruel world instead of avoiding it. We can see the slaughter of the lamb as destructive, or can see it an act of honesty (I use the word slaughter on purpose. I would suggest this is a a terrifying thought, but one which resonates long after we have left the theatre)

Or we can see the act of killing/sacrifice/slaughter as both these things: death and destruction but also cleansing and purifying…

For me that’s the beauty of the play, the control of dramatic form, language ‘character’ theme etc have allowed Matt to make a play that allows the audience ‘into’ the text in a way a play like Gethsemane (I decided to pick another Belvoir production I saw) does not… so that we can even add/disagree and discuss the play with the writer and draw from it in ways he did not intend.

However, while I understand how the idea of ‘sacrifice’ makes sense as a symbolic idea in a world where there is a tangible relationship between the divine and human in the world Tom has created in what sense is her death a sacrifice? I mean this in all seriousness. Tom’s world has removed the notion of the gods as actors in the lives of people – her death to me therefore seems to not be a sacrifice but a death in the face of the reality of life. The indifference of nature to suffering. This seems to me to be very different to the notion of sacrifice and therefore the symbolism of her as a fawn/lamb is mixed…

Does that make any sense????

A jumble of thoughts… But for me the crucial fact is that the play is still buzzing around in my little brain even if it buzzes around in a way that other people may find very bizarre…

Anyway, thought I would add to the discussion. Not sure if my thoughts went anywhere but I thought it was a pity to leave just two of you in this discussion!

Might go and post my ramblings below Kevin Jackson’s very interesting review!!!!

you are putting me on the spot – but that’s okay – i do feel should rise to the occasion on Love Me Tender. And I will – do my best to do so. My site’s back up with an updated WordPress (quite different in my ways), am in the middle of relocating from a PC back to a Mac (at last – and many of its formats have changed since last time I was a Mac user), and still a few glitches on my site to be solved. So instead of writing, I keep having to stop to work stuff out. But getting there.

Think I might just cut and past that paragraph and put it up on my site – where right now I am trying to catch up on Big hART stuff – four projects I want to mention: two recently finished – and two new ones on the way.

To write about about Love Me Tender is quite a challenge – but it needs to be talked about – a very creative script and bold staging.