16 October 2006
Seven & Seven
Posted by tony under: London .
Having lived in the beating heart of London for so long, I thought I was pretty much unshockable when it comes to the arts. I didn’t raise an eyebrow when Puppetry of the Penis came to town, I didn’t raise my head from my paper to acknowledge Damien Hirst’s rotting livestock, my headphones remained resolutely embedded during some of the more descriptive Peaches songs. However, something I saw last Friday shocked me to my core and made me finally realise that our culture has been utterly corrupted. Last Friday I was taken to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Royal Theatre in Haymarket.
They call it a musical, a family one apparently. But what kind of sick individual would take his family to see this? My father apparently. As a family treat in honour of my mother’s 20th 40th birthday, he decided this clarion call for moral iniquity would make a fun night out.
This descent into the heart of darkness starts out deceptively enough with the story of a bunch of brothers who seem to have left ballet school to make their way in the wild west and I settled down to watch what I only imagined was going to be some kind of high-camp cowboy romp. Then it all went dark.
Midway through the performance, the brothers are rebuffed at ‘a social’. Instead of using this as a learning experience about the importance of personal hygiene, they decide to re-enact the most famous, vicious gang-rape in history: the rape of the Sabine women. They then promptly kidnap the local women and hold them against their will in a remote mountain cabin, echoing for me the recent harrowing Austrian kidnap case where Natascha Kampusch was kept in a basement for years by Wolfgang Priklopil. Then, in a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, the women begin to fall in love with their captors and there are weddings galore.
That a musical can come out with the essential moral lesson that if you can’t get a girl to talk to you when she’s out one night, you should kidnap her and wait for her to fall in love with you, is quite simply sick. That my father, who apparently knew the plot before we even got there, would think this appropriate for a family celebration suggests our long history of family insanity has struck again. I fear for the future.
3 Comments so far...
Mr Qudson Says:
16 October 2006 at 4:56 pm.
Mr T Hudson,
This is a very misleading blog. You know full well that the brothers learn their lesson - that they shouldn’t steal women - and you imply strongly that these women are taken advantage of in the course of the play, through your use of the hardly neutral term ‘gang rape’. In fact their honours remain fully intact.
You also fail to mention that the show is pure shit from start to finish. In fact, you make it sound quite racy. Unforgiveable lazy journalism, T Hudson. You’ve spent too much time with the execrable, elder Mr Wudson.
Yours,
Mr Qudson
tony Says:
16 October 2006 at 5:06 pm.
My apologies Mr Qudson, but I must disagree with you. The brothers demonstrably do not learn their lesson as they are amply rewarded with brainwashed wives at the end of the day.
Yours humbly,
T
roxy Says:
16 October 2006 at 7:07 pm.
is family insanity also the excuse for dating irate and stressed ex-strippers on a separate continent?
