Stitching vs. Sister Act
A few weeks ago, I saw my friend Kathryn in the current tour of Sister Act, the Musical. It was the same week that I read Anthony Neilson’s play Stitching for the first time.
The juxtaposition of these two very different pieces of art, lead me to think about the two of them a lot and so I thought I would share some of those thoughts.
Sister Act is basically a simplistic Disney-fication of the world, good triumphs, the bad guys get their just desserts, but the audience go home happy and reassured that the world is the kind of place where good triumphs and the bad guys get what they deserve. In essence, it is a lie. It avoids the truth in order to make the audience feel better about the world, they leave happy and singing, reassured that life is lovely after all. A musical like this represents life with the edges taken off. And people whine “but sometimes people just want to have fun”.
Acting in work like this is to take part in, continue and countenance the lie.
On the flipside is Neilson’s play which people call controversial, extreme, obscene, blasphemous and brutal. Neilson shows the world, not as it is either, at least not on the polite surface, he turns the pockets of people’s private lives inside out and shows us the lint, the fluff and their unpleasant secrets.
This is our private lives presented on the surface, rather than hidden away. It is our dirty secrets shared before an audience.
To me, there is nothing extreme about Abby and Stu’s attempts to make their relationship work, no matter how sordid, it feels no different from the lengths, the humiliations that many of us would go to, to be with the person we think we should be with. And the pain and humiliation we would suffer is presented by Neilson with bravery.
His work exposes what is beneath and is the opposite of the musical, it is the world painted black.
To play in this type of piece is to expose yourself to the sharp edges and explore the darkness of human relationships for yourself. But it is to show people something so raw and truthful that the unsettled audience may refuse to hear it.
We need both types of art, they balance each other out. One is a lie, the other is too painful to face. Both are necessary.
COACH
Mark Westbrook – Senior Acting Coach