rm | The Seafarer

This is the sort of play that I think a lot of people will view as small or simple or even boring, because it's about such revoltingly average people (even the Devil proves to be a paragon of mediocrity and desire thwarted) having an ultimately uneventful encounter with the supernatural.

But... it's really quite moving: drunks who laugh at themselves not because they don't know what they are, but because they do; and the Devil, a gifted child who doesn't understand why his father better loves his weaker siblings. His flaws, somehow, have gone unrecognized and earned him nothing but a love of poker. This is a world of men, oddly in touch with their own awkward physicality and victim to it, even as they preen in their drunken flesh.

I really loved it. It's about luck, after all, and how even good luck is a fairly sinister thing.

Also, Ciaran Hinds -- what a weak, angry, sloppy Devil! But perhaps, what charmed me most was the curtain call (a good curtain call can make a show), because with every bow he looked up and scanned the balcony as if he had never seen an audience before and grinned. It is always the most amazing pleasure to be in the presence of something like that, and fitting, at the end of such a show to see someone recognizing magic.

Poor Patty seems to have what I had last week that made me just want to sleep all the time. So I'm at work and she's home doing just that, but it was very sweet to hold her hand through this one.