Skip to main content

So I thought I should talk about: The Sea/ London

16/12/17

Hello
A little break post-Hommo. I was tired. 

My next show is picking up speed. 'The Sea' runs March 1-3 at The Camden People's Theatre. I can't work out if I'm stressed yet or not. 

It's all about London and being in a big city and being lonely. It picks up the theme of the difficulty of communication that Hommo approached a little. 'Hommo's men who can't talk about their feelings have become 'The Sea's lonely person who can't talk to anyone. 

I wanted to write a play about being just one person. One individual in a crowd of so many others. One bus ticket on a jammed packed number 253. One Oyster card in Holborn. One bike on Waterloo Bridge. 

I think everyone I've spoken to at a university in London has said they felt lonely at some point. I think everyone moving to a big, new, different  city felt a bit odd at some point, but with London I feel you have to fight off that loneliness. There's so much going on, it's impossible to avoid feeling insignificant. Why would anyone care about what you're doing when there're so many other people to care about? 

I also wanted to get a feeling of the disconnectedness our parallel internet lives create. Everyone's got such an interesting life when they become their online avatar. Even staying inside and getting Uber Eats can be interesting if you can Tweet and Snap about it.

So you force yourself to stand out the crowd, but then you're not where it's at. So you force your way back into the crowd, but then you're insignificant. 

'The Sea' is my new play about being just one person in the big crowded city. 

"So sometimes I just stay in my apartment for the evening because I’m tired from walking or something like that. And when that happens I go to sleep very quickly because there's nothing else I want to do." A, Act 1 Scene 3 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Guest 2. Eleanor Paisley

17.2.18 Eleanor Paisley moved to London in September 2016 London is many things to many people: formidable, dirty, modern, exciting, full of opportunity. For me, London represented a step towards the life I wanted to have: being at the centre of everything in a multicultural society. As a student, I did feel as if I was in another world. It didn’t feel like I was in England at all. I would regularly socialise with fewer English people than otherwise – which suited me just fine. In university as well as all over London, the word ‘metropolitan’ applies perfectly. However, the adjective that I would most use when describing my time in London is ‘lonely’. In a sea of people, running from A to C to B then back to A again on the tube, buses, bikes, taxis, cars and trains, you become totally anonymous. Despite walking every day from Southwark to Strand, I rarely got to see much greenery. The air is alive with the business of the people, and only myself and a handful of my cohorts dared ...

Guest 1. Mania Lewandowska

14/2/18. Mania Lewandowska I moved to London in (a) September. They had organised a farewell party for me, where my brother said: “ I remember when you were three and you would scream your lungs out every time you saw a fly. And now you ’ re going to uni. I can ’ t believe it. ” I couldn ’ t really believe it either. A week later, on the first day of Freshers ’ , I twisted my ankle running through Camden to catch a bus, and spent five hours in the accident and emergency waiting room of UCLH, dozing off with my head resting on my mum ’ s shoulder. She was supposed to fly back the next day, and I was supposed to stay, mature and independent, on my own. They told me the leg wasn ’ t broken and gave me a pair of wobbly crutches; it was 3a.m. as I hopped back to my dorm along Euston Road. It was the first time that I realised that traffic was a constant thing in London, happening not only in rush hour, but absolutely always. You could be stuck in a senseless jam at 4 at night ...

So I thought I should say, that I'm only sayin..

12.9.17 So I want to follow on from my *highly* controversial blog about Elvis, mixed in with a little Daily Show and the ethics of blog-writing. So: Elvis. I argued that Elvis’ appropriation of black music and style meant that I didn’t really understand his masculinity. I argued that my understanding of masculinity was different from his because he mixed cultures and warped the pattern of masculinity I’m used to. My understanding of masculinity is obviously 50 odd years later than his, and there has obviously been change and (d)evolution. I focussed on ethnicity/culture as a key part of that transformation, but maybe this hasnt changed. How many prominent male black actors have been chosen to play the good guy in the last ten years in any Hollywood film? (Note- this is rhetorical: of course there have been- John Boyega in Star Wars and Detroit, Will Smith in anything, Morgan Freeman in anything. But when did Samuel Jackson play the nice guy?) How many black men have been chose...