So here’s my Frankenstein review. Hamlet is on its way, just got to finish this lovely pot of coffee, then I’ll start writing.
Yesterday I saw another play with Kotryna. It was called ‘Life Without Me’… It was basically about a hotel and its occupants, with the hotel lobby acting as the main stage for the events of the play and balconies above where guests stood now and then, talking to each other. The dialog was at times poetic and witty and…
Gosh, I’m so awful at writing about plays I’ve seen. I’ve only seen… well, let’s see. There’s Life Without Me, The Trial, our school’s productions of Midsummer Nights Dream (a very good one, by the way) and their production of Grease, which was a musical of course, and the ballet Edward Scissorhands… See? I’ve little experience in this sort of thing. They were all far too wonderful in their own ways for my clumsy fingers to type words that would describe them in an apt enough way.
The characters in Life Without Me really struck me. They were all trapped between somewhere and nowhere, though not all of them were as horribly aware of this fact as Greg Stone’s character. They all try to leave the shabby hotel, but can’t. They’re trapped together with their issues and each other. The set was fantastic and I was pretty put off to hear that it was to be demolished immediately after we’d left. How cruel!
The tragedy of the human condition is explored perfectly through these characters as they stumble through their lives with little sense of direction. The hotel lobby and the characters within it showed exactly how I’ve been feeling for years now. Trapped between one place and another: waiting for my life to begin and watching other guests leave the place as if it never existed while I sit in one of those cozy looking chairs and twiddle my thumbs. When will someone finally arrive to take my luggage and lead me out through the doors and onto the busy street?
I was pretty stunned when Kotryna leaned over and told me that the actress standing on the balcony above us (Deidre Rubenstein) was actually the woman that sat next to us when we went to see The Trial. I really couldn’t believe it.
It must’ve been this strange habit that we all have when it comes to famous people, even when their fame is not necessarily as large as the big time actors of Hollywood. It’s this air that surrounds them. Authors, actors, dancers, singers, bands. It’s hard to believe that they’re real. You see them on the stage and then watch as they come out of the back door without the blood their character had sported when they die at the end of the play. Even when you shyly go up to them and say hello, it’s still there.
It was the same with when I listened to a talk by Fiona McIntosh at a literary festival and later obtained her signature. I truly could not believe she was there. An author! Standing right in front of me! We started emailing each other briefly, but after a while: she stopped replying. That’s what has always peeved me and made me not want to come up and say hello to famous people. What if they don’t care? I’m most likely just another face in the crowd. Another person who wants a signature and thought ‘you were fantastic tonight’. And there’s nothing I can do to prove how very much in love I am with their work, is there? Meeting them mightn’t always be what I hope for.
They won’t always be kind, will they? I’m being cynical, but this is just what I got out of seeing the actors pour out of the stage door. Their way of leaving their own personality and lives behind whenever they step onto that stage and into the shoes of an entirely different person makes the actors themselves seem so powerful and charismatic that it’s hard to remember that they are in fact human.
Enough of this. Back to the play. There isn’t much else I can say about it apart from the fact that I got a story idea from it, so that’s always lovely for I don’t get them very often. I’m very far behind on my wordcount, so I shan’t be getting those emails written and things sent and blah blah blah this weekend. I’m afraid they’ll all have to wait until december, like everything else will. Then I won’t be at school and the exams will be over and so will NaNoWriMo, of course. I’ll be free to do whatever I like, whenever I like. Finally.
Do you remember your first love?… Your first kiss?… Do you remember?…
Apricot: a short film by Ben Briand, starring Ewen Leslie and Laura Gordon
[Watch it]
I really enjoyed this film. And not only because of the ever wonderful Ewen Leslie. See, I’ve written down a list of all of his film and television credits and I plan on watching as many as possible. Since seeing him in The Trial, I haven’t been able to get his charismatic presence out of my head. He’s just one of those actors that you really enjoy watching and simply can’t stop doing so. And this film was beautiful. The memory sequences were bathed in sunlight, while the restaurant scenes offered much different lighting and made the people around the two characters disappear. I don’t even know how to describe it. Once again, my words are mediocre and useless when it comes to recounting a thing of beauty. The soundtrack was entrancing and the dialog was even more so. Everything had a poetic feel, even the scenes in the restaurant which were so different from the dream-like ones in Madeleine’s memory. This is a must see, which is why I’m sitting here posting this mediocre review on my mediocre blog full of mediocre crap. I want others to watch it and be subject to it’s loveliness.
My senses have been heightened considerably whilst watching this film. It ended long ago, yet it still leaves its mark on my soul. In some scenes I found myself closing my eyes and listening to the dialog and soundtrack, letting it become the only thing I heard and felt.
I found my eyes becoming blurred with tears at the mere beauty of the film. And I thought of others that could be watching it. Other people in the world that sit with their wide eyes trained on the screen.
Were they bathed in light or darkness as I was? Did hot tears stream down their cheeks as the end credits ran and the poem was spoken? Did their rushed fingers brush the spines of their books until they found a poetry book, as I did? Did their eyes follow each word as it was spoken lovingly by the dark haired actor?
Did they feel the same overwhelming wave of emotions as I did? Did their eyes shine with tears as mine did? Were they not free of an overwhelming sense of being alive? Did they long to write letters and poems and tales of love and life in all it’s ecstasy and sorrow?
Did everything they did afterwards become new and picturesque, or was I alone in this strange experience of heightened emotion and the true sense of being alive?
This film makes me want to live. To experience all I can. To dance through fields of flowers and to lie in the grass and watch the clouds. To feel woe in all it’s unending power and suffering. To feel joy: a joy that seems to have no end and brings such a feeling of freedom that makes me want to scream across the rooftops that I AM ALIVE!
It makes me want to hear the scratch of pen across paper, stories manifesting from my fingertips as if by magic. It makes me want to catch butterflies in summer, waltz through the fallen leaves of autumn, dash through the rain in winter, and make daisy chains in spring. It makes me want to watch films and listen to music that makes me cry.
I want to read poetry all night, then watch the sunrise before falling into a blissful slumber. I want to love and be loved. I want to exist and not exist. It makes me want to feel every emotion possible, a blind rush of sensations that crash down upon me, only to wash away and take with them any sense of direction.
I want to walk through a forest and become hopelessly lost, sleeping under the canopy of leaves when night finds me. I want to live in my imagination forever, where I shall be lost no more. I want to have flaws and imperfections, accepting them as I never could before.
I want to learn how to dance. I want to stare out foggy windows, dreaming of another place. I want to plant wild flowers in my backyard that shall bring the sweetest of scents. I want to sing! Sing to the streets, the city, the world! The passers by on the street shall not be strangers to my voice! I want to feel true sadness and learn from it.
I want to always feel the way that this film made me feel. I want these feelings to never end, these sensations to remain where they are. I want to love the world for what it is. I want to cry as if everything is crashing down around me and I want to laugh until my stomach aches.
I want to be young forever, youth being in my eyes and soul even when my skin wrinkles and my hair grows gray. I want to let my thoughts consume me and never again hate them as I have lately. I want to start a butterfly farm during the summer and dedicate my bedroom to it.
I want to find a tree and climb up it, sleeping amongst it’s branches before reading and writing poetry in it’s comforting shade. I want to go for walks in every weather whilst listening to soothing melodies of pianos and violins.
I want to feel the full blow of all my losses and let them eat away at me. I want to let music take me far away with it’s swirling melodies and striking songs. I want to never sleep again and I want to dream forever.
I want to paint with my eyes closed and I want to take my art to the street. I want to cease to exist and I want to face death when it next enters my life. I want to dip my toes in the sand and close my eyes, feeling the ocean air caressing my face and lifting my hair into a wave-like dance.
I want to know what it is to be loved and to be touched by another human being once again. I want to become a mystery, an enigma to those around me. I want to feel disappointment, let it cut at me until I can expel it and move on. I want to stumble through the darkness and walk in the light.
I want to wake up early every day to watch the sunset. I want to touch the skin of another without fear of rejection. I want to be intoxicated by the world and nature and the mere fact that I am alive. I want to ponder death and how soon it shall come, where and when it waits for me on the horizon.
I want to write until my hand aches and I cannot hold the pen up anymore. I want to meet other people with high intellect that will read books with me. I want to be consumed by darkness and silence until I can bare it no longer and scream to the sky. I want to wear flowers in my hair and hand them out to strangers on the street. I want to drive with the window open and wear my hair down.
Above all, I want to live. Live through the sorrow and ecstasy and suffering. Living is not what I used to think it was. I believed that it was pure happiness and freedom. And I believed that I was missing out on it. But living never was so. It was the moments of wretchedness and bliss. The nights spent crying for those lost and the days spent prancing through a dream free from worry. I was living all along.
This world, to me, still is not real. I’ve never believed that it is so. One day, I shall die and pass over to the true world. This is a test of what we can handle and what we cannot. We all shall fade away one day, our existence a memory left behind, a whisper in our loved one’s ears. I
t soon shall be as if we never existed. As if we were never born, kicking and screaming: rejecting the world we’d just been put in. We shall be buried in the ground and many shall walk over us without a second glance at our grave stones. Or shall we be cremated? Ashes in an old brown urn to be scattered at sea or kept on top of the fireplace beside an old picture of us.
When we pass, it shall be like waking from a dream. Was it real, or do I confuse reality with my vivid imaginings again? Do I dream again of strange faces made familiar with kind words? Do I dream of aching and grief so real to me that their ghosts remained the next morning, sunlight streaming through the window?
Shall the memory of our lives even remain, or shall we wake in a strange place without the lingering feel of lips on our skin, goose bumps rising at the very thought of it? Shall we all die a human and return a butterfly or a bird, flying over those we used to know without a thought of recognition passing through our minds?
We cannot know, so we live our lives without knowing what waits at the end. A prize, no doubt, for all that we have been through. Or nothing at all, this being our only life to live? All we can be sure of is that we are alive. We are alive.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever: it’s loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” - John Keats
