Kick a Dead Man When He's Down

Or "Why Naming Things Is, like, Totally Awesome"

Yeah so today there was a wrap up in The Age of what they felt thought about the Arts Festival. In the interest of, well, disclosure I should perhaps admit that I freeloaded my way into the opening of that sucker and I would like to thank/blame the Arts Festival for my recent descent into Big Weekends (and the concomitant Shame Spiral Of Doom that can only be silenced by more drinking).

Oh who am I fooling? The Arts Festival Opening was really just the first ringing of the bell of Summer. The bell of excess and vomiting but no sausages this year, for reals alright? Dainty Sichuan might be on the mauve terror list also now I think about it...

To return to the pressing lesson of the Arts Festival, however, and the bait and switch that they employed with "Now That Communism Is Dead, My Life Is Empty". I defy anyone to tell me that that is not an excellent name for a play. Accompanied by the photos of dour eastern bloc ladies with balls held to their swimsuit clad thighs, those boys were definitely on a winner. How terrible, how ... deeply sad... for want of a better expression, that theatre, like so much else these days, has succumbed to the thirty second power-grab-sound-bite attack. Where the 30 seconds of power are all in the title of the play and the horrendous, meaningless, sound and fury signifying nothing, usually covered by the "sell" of, say, an advert, are now contained in the hour plus time of the play.

My dad and I compared notes afterwards. It went something along the lines of "hey, how glad are we that we were twenty minutes late, right?" "Did that whole thing mean anything, anyway?" "are we so bourgeois that it is a cliché to be pissed off by that play... or wait, did it really just suck?"

The thing that it taught me was that that play would've been nothing and nowhere without it’s title. And without it's title I definitely would've been nowhere near it. Which could only've been a good thing.