A certain amount of vacuum

The School of Computer Science and Engineering has produced some extremely well-done spexes, but it’s been almost a decade since last. So I was quite happy to see that they’d now joined forces with the School of Media Technology and produced an all-new spex. Clearly I had to go see it.

So, this Friday I found myself in one of the off-S:t Eriksplan cellar theatres with an excited crowd of what apparently was mainly friends and parents. The audience was very pleased with the show, but, alas, I must say this must have been the same kind of pleasure proud parents feel at Lucia shows at day care.

The actors certainly knew their lines, but they completely lacked in timing on stage. Then again, the dialogue was wooden enough that it really didn’t make much of a difference. With delicious irony, the finale was a version of “With a little help from my friends” and the actors certainly could have needed a bit of help trying not to sing out of key.

That said, it was not all bad. Actually, I’d say that the choreography made up for much of the other deficits and there was a “One office and five drummers” that was quite excellent. There were a few clever restarts as well, one involving doing “bullet time” dodging—live on stage.

Still, I found myself thinking back to the glory days of D spexes. I hope a new generation of witty and creative script writers will soon be born.

Gustav III

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

It’s been altogether too long since I went to a spex, so I brought along the posse to see ”Gustav III, eller, Svårigheten att komma till skott” (“Gustav III, or, Barkeep, gimme another shot”).

It seems the state of spex has moved somewhat, at least judging from this sample, which kept high standards of acting and psychological development, while the audience had become more rowdy, constantly yelling requests at the actors. I was also a bit surprised to find that all female roles were played by actual women and the male roles all by men. (Honeybuns suggested that cross-dressing is so common it has no effect any more and thus can just be dumped.) The second-act ensemble a capella had been moved to the finale and there was no Pun Cascade worth mentioning.

That said, it was a tightly scripted exercise, starting with King Gustav away in France, shirking his duties according to his brother, the prim and stiff Duke Charles. Therefore he has hatched a plan to oust the king with the help of their cousin, Empress Catherine. Bellman, ne’er-do-well and the King’s best friend, however joyously announces that the king is returning. Hollinder, the barman at Gyldene Freden, is being henpecked by visiting nobles.

Eventually the king arrives and goes straight to Gyldene Freden to find Bellman and tell of his travels in France, where Liberty, Equality and Fraternity have just been invented. Bellman and the king celebrate their reunion with joyous horse-play, but both Duke Charles and Queen Sophia turn up to remind the king of his duties: wars and parties. Tomorrow there will be a masked ball to celebrate the return of the king and the queen wants it to be “Perfect perfect perfect”. Bellman, being a commoner, is expressly not wanted at the party. Bellman is hurt and the king is pained but forced to uphold the queen’s decree, because after all, one has to do one’s duties.

Duke Charles and Catherine have a secret meeting where he explains that the king should be made to abdicate. Catherine, a stereotypical Russian who will kiss and kill with the same hearty laugh, has no patience with such finesse and decides on her own to simply kill the king. Hollinder suggests she contact a mysterious man, known as Anckarström. This she does and hands the masked Anckarström money and a gun with which to shoot the king.

The next day the queen is dressing up the unhappy king, who vainly tries to explain that he actually does not want to be king and really not her husband either. She does not listen, but gets more and more exasperated with his uninterest in the perfect perfect perfect ball. When the king leaves, she has a chat with Catherine, who explains how she killed her husband the Czar and became ruler over the Russian empire. Sophia gets an idea. Catherine offers help—in exchange for suitable parts of the Swedish kingdom. They haggle for a while over who’ll have to take Finland. An upset Finn in the audience curses loudly.

Meanwhile the king has sought out Bellman and asks him to came to the ball anyway. Bellman has a bright idea for how the king can escape his duties and rushes off without having time to explain his idea.

Sophia finds Anckarström and hands him money and a gun with which to kill the king.
Bellman also locates Anckarström and hands him money and a gun with which to kill the king. We understand that this gun is loaded with a blank.

Before the masked ball Hollinder, who is responsible for the catering, arrives with a heavy bag, which he nervously tries to hide and then opens. It turns out to contain three guns and Anckarström’s mask and cape. He picks one of the guns at random. The ball begins.

During the ball a masked man turns up and shoots the king, who falls. Curtains.

In the final act Duke Charles is besides himself, what hath Catherine wrought, this was not his plan at all. Is the king still alive even? A physician, suspiciously similar to Bellman in disguise, assures he has the situation under control, but is also very nervous. In private with the king it turns out the king is alive, though wounded. Bellman is desperately upset that his plan backfired so badly. The king tries to console him. But, can they escape? Before they manage to leave, everybody else arrive in the king’s chamber through various secret passages. In particular a wild-eyed Hollinder arrives, determined to go into history by finishing the job with his two remaining guns. Duke Charles manages to snatch one of these for himself and there is a standoff for the space of several restarts of the ensemble a capella, and then the two men fire. Both Hollinder and the king fall. The czarina and the queen rejoice, but Duke Charles takes over the situation at swordpoint and sends them packing.

The king awakes from his faint to the joy of Bellman and the relief of Duke Charles. The king however decides it suits him to remain dead and leave for France with Bellman, leaving the kingdom in the hands of Duke Charles. The brothers solemnly take farewell and then finally Gustav and Bellman can meet in a deep kiss. The audience goes wild. Curtains.

I was quite impressed with the performance of Gustav, unwilling but duty-bound, the straight man of the play. Hollinder, also a man under pressure, got somewhat short shrift, being killed with no eulogies (though yet a better death than the real Anckarström received). On the whole an enjoyable evening.

There’s no reason to applaud

One of the things that makes a spex a unique experience is that the audience can demand instant replays of particularly funny scenes, typically with an alternative rendition of the scene.

In the spex ”1492, eller, Expedition: Inkvisition” princess Joanna feigns madness in order not to be married off. Then she meets and falls in love with prince Philip. When Philip suddenly dies of poison she becomes insane for real. At the performance I saw this became an absolutely heart-rending scene. A small section of the audience shouted “Restart!”, but all the rest squeezed “No!” past the lumps in their throats. The emotions were too real, there could be no restart, no jokes to make light of what had happened. The play ended on an unusually sombre note for a spex.

I felt much the same when I finally heard the lyrics to “Another Day in Paradise”—how can you dance to this?

The stage is all a world

The Only-begotten Daughter's theatre class had developed a play of their own again, yet again touching on the theme of struggling for a better world while people are as they are.

The setting was of a house scheduled for demolition being squatted by a disparate gang of youths, ostensibly to turn it into a house of youth culture, but the high-flying plans coming to nothing. A dizzying ambiguity underlay everything, not allowing any easy taking of any given position, putting every interpretation into question. Their soliloquies on how life could be more beautiful or their own pain were just enough over the top to possibly be taken as ironic subversions of themselves, yet perhaps not. In the end the police storm the building and the group stand together, lighting up the dark with their little cigarette lighter sparks of hope, singing “Imagine”, yet defecting into the dark one by one.

Certainty? Nowhere.

Love in the Old Town

I just got back from the Old Town where I've seen a promenade performance of Romeo and Juliet. The young actors made skilful use of the geography and chronology, starting with the prologue in the evening sunshine on Stortorget, the play meandering through alleys, squares and passages while the sun set and the final tragic deaths took place in dark night behind the cathedral. The musical accompaniment ranged from ”Mamma är lik sin mamma” to Gregorian Dies iræ.

The Old Town takes on a special kind of magic late at night when the tourists have returned to their hotels and cruise ships, when the noise dies down and the cobble-stoned alleys are lit by street lamps and light filtering down from house windows. (And there is no cause for nostalgia, because the streets were never so clean nor well-lit, nor the people so healthy and wealthy, in the days of either Birger Jarl, Gustaf Vasa, Bellman, August Blanche, or Nils Ferlin.)

There are still a few performances left this coming week. Do not put it off, run and go see!

With this in our past, where is our future?

The Only-Begotten Daughter's theatre class gave a play again: Animal Farm.
They might have benefitted from a few more rehearsals, but overall they acquitted themselves well, with sterling performances by “Boxer” and “Benjamin”.
Watching the animals starve and rebuild their windmill again and again I wondered what lies ahead for these bright kids, if they can look forward to a reasonably privileged life or if they will have to struggle for their lives through upheaval and famine—certainly even Sweden was a much harsher place to live just a hundred years ago. Hasse Alfredsson has expressed it so much better than I.