Someone Who'll Watch Over Me

Today I watched the play "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me", written by Frank McGuinness. As someone more familiar with cinema than theatre, I tended to compare it mentally to, of course, Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, the irony being KotS was a play to begin with (though I would love to catch it some day, not least because Wong Kar-Wai has said before that its playwright, Manuel Puig, was his greatest influence).

Both plays have the same premise: prisoners stuck in a cell, trying to survive fear, madness, loneliness and the physical hardship of incarceration, not necessarily in that order. KotS has two prisoners; SWWOM has three - an American, an Irishman and an Englishman (which sounds like the beginning of a bad joke; but believe me, I swear that is the opening line of virtually every review I read). But therein the similarities end. KotS, with a tighter, more coherent and ultimately better formed structure, had its faultlines clearly drawn: the sexuality differences, which cast and were used to play out very effectively the conflict between the two characters; and ideology, which subsequently lifted the play to a transcendent level. SWWOM, on the other hand, never really took off. There was no clear-cut conflict on which the play could cut itself incisively. Of course, there were the usual jibes about each nationality, and the acting was powerful enough to give out the occasional emotional moment. But ultimately it felt like three guys stuck in a room making snarky comments at each other; there is no transcendence, no illumination, and ultimately nothing redeeming. The ultimate antagonist seemed to be boredom; the ultimate lesson: try not to be either American or British when you travel to potentially hostile countries (in the play, the characters were locked in a Lebanese cell. The American got killed; the Irishman was released; and the Englishman's fate unknown - there's a lesson in there somewhere......)

There is a great temptation to compare the confined cell to the Platonian cave: "the ensconcing of our blindness in a confining interiority, seeing 'literally nothing but the shadows of the images', while truth resided outside as a world of sunlight, water and spangled heavens." (I wrote that, though elsewhere.) The prisoners in both plays play games, tell stories and create fantasies to try and take their minds off their dismal conditions (at one point in SWWOM, the Irishman and the Englishman pretended to drive a car, which eventually started flying, and (yes) both guys started singing "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (where Chitty is female). I gather from the reviews that didn't happen in the Broadway version - maybe because they didn't have the very musical playing in another theatre literally next door.) And is that not what we do as well in our Platonian cave - those of us enlightened and still trapped? Unable to get out, we play games to comfort ourselves, cherish false dreams, imagine for ourselves the dappled outside world? The ending of both plays, however, do not bode well: in the end, Ed, the Irishman in SWWOM, was released because of his green passport, which is no good: too literal. Valentin in KotS "escaped" through death, hardly of any comfort.

So what do we have left?

Just keep dreaming, just keep dreaming......