24 November, 2007
(0 ) 00:17 Just got back from watching The Pillowman and I can tell you the fifty bucks I spent for the tickets were worth it. Well I could have gotten a student discount, but Meow couldn't make it on Saturday because of piano lessons--or so I thought, when I bought the tickets. But her lessons got cancelled after I bought them so ho hum, nevermind, eh? But it was worth it anyway, even after adding in the SISTIC ticket surcharge and the $2 we "donated" to get a copy of the programme.
Anyway, I'm no critic and I know next to nothing about plays. In fact, I think this is my first after Macbeth in Sec 2. But The Pillowman was good. It's dark, funny, sick, gruesome, sad, dramatic, thought-provoking and generally an enjoyable experience. It's quite long though; the first half is 1 hour and 40 min (I think?), followed by a 10 min intermission, and another hour in the second half.
The second half moved faster than the first half, but I thought both were equally interesting. I liked the wit behind the dialogue, and just how every bit of the story was tied together nicely, and the parallels between the story of the Pillowman the main character, Katurian, wrote and the actual situation he was in.
Here's a summary of Wikipedia's description of the play:
Katurian is a short story writer who is being interviewed by two policemen, Tupolski and Ariel. Apparently, there have been some bizarre child murders happening around town that are similar to his short stories. After being interrogated/tortured, he is thrown into a cell with his mentally handicapped brother Michal. Michal says that he is the one who killed the children, and was only acting out the stories. Katurian didn't want his brother to be executed for something he wasn't fully cognisant about so he smothers his brother with a pillow. He then confesses to the murders and makes a deal with the two policemen that if he did they would not destroy his stories. He is eventually exposed when evidence didn't match up to his testimony, but he is executed anyway for the murder of his parents and Michal.
I can't say I liked Katurian's gruesome, sadistic short stories. Here's a link to A Tale of the Town on the River, the first story we hear, if you want to get a taste of just what kind of stories Katurian writes. I must admit the twist at the end is pretty clever and I was mentally going "Oh my god, so that's what he's talking about!" and would have said it out loud if I weren't in the middle of a play. Haha.
I liked the casting, the dialogue and the was a role-reversal of "good cop" and "bad cop" at the end. AND HEY, I got to see Adrian Pang in the flesh! I really like the experience of watching a play and how intimate it is because the actors are there, live, reciting the lines and living the lives of the characters on-stage. I guess after witnessing school plays and such (Dramafest, anyone?) watching something done by professionals is like woah. Really really good.
Why couldn't we study something good like this for lit? Then again it only premièred at the end of 2003 so I guess that wasn't possible. But I would love to analyse The Pillowman. Heck, I want to watch it again, if it weren't for the hefty price tag. It's showing till the 25th, but a quick check on the SISTIC website tells me that all tickets are sold out.
Anyway cabbed home after the play. It ended at 11pm so I didn't want to endure the travails of public mass transportation. Meow ended up getting the first taxi we could flag down because I lost in a game of scissors-paper-stone (haha), so I walked down to the Liang Court taxi stand. It was probably nothing, but it was kind of scary nonetheless, walking alone on the streets. Sure, it wasn't like 1am or anything, and there were lots of people around, but it was those very people that I was kinda wary of. Thinking back now it was kind of stupid of course. Was relieved nonetheless when I got on the cab anyway.
I'm so glad it's the weekend! I've been subsisting on dial-up during the week, because my mum's monitoring her stocks online (yeah, damn, she finally figured out how to surf the net...). I realised that dial-up wasn't as bad as I remembered to be. It's sufficient for surfing the web, but not for downloading any kind of media. So I have this huge backlog of music that I have to catch up on, and torrents that I have to seed. Listening to the dial tone does bring back memories though. I've been hearing the same number being dialled ever since I was in primary school.
Oh I've finished reading most of the manga I downloaded (unlicensed, of course) but and I have to wait for the respective scanlation groups to get their new chapters up. ARGH THE WAIT. I do know how much work it takes to translate though, because I tried my hand and doing some Chinese-English translating work for a Jap drama (funny, right?) and I take like, 3-4 solid hours to translate a 1 hour episode.
On a side note, I use mIRC for my manga fix and I'm it increasingly annoying. I know it's shareware and if I look hard enough maybe I'll find a crack for it or something, but having to wait before I can sign in is a pain in the ass.
But anyway one of the manga I'm reading is called The Hour of the Mice and it's about this group of children studying at this "exclusive" school which is actually owned by a pharmaceutical company that is using them as human test subjects. It's really interesting and the art's good. You can download the scanlations from Kotonoha's website. They're a scanlation group I recently discovered and they work on a lot of rare treasures. It's definitely a breather from all those candy-coated formulaic shoujo manga.
Rightyo. I'd better go sleep soon. Have to make use of the weekend to study for Spanish next Tuesday. Argh, I think I'm going to do really badly for my exams, especially for 258, which I just crapped through. Ho hum.
Edit: Ugh, so many errors. I can't be bothered to correct them. This is what happens when you blog at 1+am.
Anyway, I'm no critic and I know next to nothing about plays. In fact, I think this is my first after Macbeth in Sec 2. But The Pillowman was good. It's dark, funny, sick, gruesome, sad, dramatic, thought-provoking and generally an enjoyable experience. It's quite long though; the first half is 1 hour and 40 min (I think?), followed by a 10 min intermission, and another hour in the second half.
The second half moved faster than the first half, but I thought both were equally interesting. I liked the wit behind the dialogue, and just how every bit of the story was tied together nicely, and the parallels between the story of the Pillowman the main character, Katurian, wrote and the actual situation he was in.
Here's a summary of Wikipedia's description of the play:
Katurian is a short story writer who is being interviewed by two policemen, Tupolski and Ariel. Apparently, there have been some bizarre child murders happening around town that are similar to his short stories. After being interrogated/tortured, he is thrown into a cell with his mentally handicapped brother Michal. Michal says that he is the one who killed the children, and was only acting out the stories. Katurian didn't want his brother to be executed for something he wasn't fully cognisant about so he smothers his brother with a pillow. He then confesses to the murders and makes a deal with the two policemen that if he did they would not destroy his stories. He is eventually exposed when evidence didn't match up to his testimony, but he is executed anyway for the murder of his parents and Michal.
I can't say I liked Katurian's gruesome, sadistic short stories. Here's a link to A Tale of the Town on the River, the first story we hear, if you want to get a taste of just what kind of stories Katurian writes. I must admit the twist at the end is pretty clever and I was mentally going "Oh my god, so that's what he's talking about!" and would have said it out loud if I weren't in the middle of a play. Haha.
I liked the casting, the dialogue and the was a role-reversal of "good cop" and "bad cop" at the end. AND HEY, I got to see Adrian Pang in the flesh! I really like the experience of watching a play and how intimate it is because the actors are there, live, reciting the lines and living the lives of the characters on-stage. I guess after witnessing school plays and such (Dramafest, anyone?) watching something done by professionals is like woah. Really really good.
Why couldn't we study something good like this for lit? Then again it only premièred at the end of 2003 so I guess that wasn't possible. But I would love to analyse The Pillowman. Heck, I want to watch it again, if it weren't for the hefty price tag. It's showing till the 25th, but a quick check on the SISTIC website tells me that all tickets are sold out.
Anyway cabbed home after the play. It ended at 11pm so I didn't want to endure the travails of public mass transportation. Meow ended up getting the first taxi we could flag down because I lost in a game of scissors-paper-stone (haha), so I walked down to the Liang Court taxi stand. It was probably nothing, but it was kind of scary nonetheless, walking alone on the streets. Sure, it wasn't like 1am or anything, and there were lots of people around, but it was those very people that I was kinda wary of. Thinking back now it was kind of stupid of course. Was relieved nonetheless when I got on the cab anyway.
I'm so glad it's the weekend! I've been subsisting on dial-up during the week, because my mum's monitoring her stocks online (yeah, damn, she finally figured out how to surf the net...). I realised that dial-up wasn't as bad as I remembered to be. It's sufficient for surfing the web, but not for downloading any kind of media. So I have this huge backlog of music that I have to catch up on, and torrents that I have to seed. Listening to the dial tone does bring back memories though. I've been hearing the same number being dialled ever since I was in primary school.
Oh I've finished reading most of the manga I downloaded (unlicensed, of course) but and I have to wait for the respective scanlation groups to get their new chapters up. ARGH THE WAIT. I do know how much work it takes to translate though, because I tried my hand and doing some Chinese-English translating work for a Jap drama (funny, right?) and I take like, 3-4 solid hours to translate a 1 hour episode.
On a side note, I use mIRC for my manga fix and I'm it increasingly annoying. I know it's shareware and if I look hard enough maybe I'll find a crack for it or something, but having to wait before I can sign in is a pain in the ass.
But anyway one of the manga I'm reading is called The Hour of the Mice and it's about this group of children studying at this "exclusive" school which is actually owned by a pharmaceutical company that is using them as human test subjects. It's really interesting and the art's good. You can download the scanlations from Kotonoha's website. They're a scanlation group I recently discovered and they work on a lot of rare treasures. It's definitely a breather from all those candy-coated formulaic shoujo manga.
Rightyo. I'd better go sleep soon. Have to make use of the weekend to study for Spanish next Tuesday. Argh, I think I'm going to do really badly for my exams, especially for 258, which I just crapped through. Ho hum.
Edit: Ugh, so many errors. I can't be bothered to correct them. This is what happens when you blog at 1+am.