Friday, November 6, 2015

Green Day's American Idiot

Our first theatre experience in London was of a unique kind. This performance was created to turn Greenday's rock opera American Idiot into a stage production, really bringing the music to life.

We entered The Arts Theatre to discover a small cafe with the box office desk up the back. We still had half an hour until the show started, so we ordered a hot chocolate and piece of cake each, and stand around with some of the other audience members who got there early to wait. The hot chocolate was absolutely amazing by the way - if you ever go here, get one!

We enter the theatre through the doors downstairs, and find ourselves seated in the second row (unexpectedly - the performance we'd meant to see was cancelled so these were automatically re-booked tickets). It is a delightfully small and intimate theatre, clearly designed so that everyone feels up close and personal with the show.

An actor soon comes out and sits himself on the stairs leading to the stage. I thought perhaps he was going to do a bit of pre-show something or other, but no, he was already in character, the performance starting before you realise it. I'm no stage critic, and I won't go through the performance scene by scene. I will, however, say that each musical performance shocked me in its intensity. I don't really know what I expected from the show, but it was incredible.

It revolves around the lives of three young American men, dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. One friend finds out his girlfriend is pregnant, and stays behind as the other two go off in search of a better/more meaningful life. His scenes show how he deals with being 'left behind', and the dissolving of his family unit as he refused to play the role of future and then new father. The second friend joins the defence force, and we witness his life during and after being sent to the field. The third friend is the main character in this story, and we follow along his descent into drugs. There is of course a happy ending, in which the three friends are back together some years later, all with mental and physical scars from the time that has passed.

The actors were absolutely brilliant. You could truly buy in to their characters, and empathise with their struggles and pain. You felt sad when they felt sad, you felt happy when they felt happy. Their voices were incredibly strong, carrying the songs with power and emotion, turning the radio tunes you may have bopped along to back in the day into songs of true meaning, focused on these characters. The stage was set perfectly for every scene, the props necessary, the lights and sounds all combining to make you forget you're sitting in a theatre.

Some of the scenes involved a lot of adult content - sex scenes and many, many of drug and alcohol use. It surprised me to see children in the audience. I'm sure those parents had a few specific conversations with their children at the end of the show! This grittiness only added to the story though. One particular scene stuck with me, and probably will for a long time - the main character is in his bedroom, girlfriend asleep on the bed, and he is on the floor injecting himself with drugs. The lights are bright, there is not a single sound from the stage except those made by the actor as he acts out this powerful scene. There was not a single sound from the audience, as we were all confronted by the truth of his performance - no romanticism, no judgement, just a drug addict getting his next fix while trying not to wake his girlfriend. The whole scene went for about 5 minutes, and it was quite eerie to be seated in a perfectly silent theatre of a few hundred people, no sound being made except by the actor.

Overall it was a truly incredible performance. The standing ovation at the end was well deserved by the entire cast. Even if you knew nothing of the album it was based on, the show itself is still well worth seeing!

No comments:

Post a Comment