Tonight I watched a live stream from the Almeida Theatre of a newly written play ‘hymn’ by Lolita Chakrabarti. The opening night, the World Premier to be so grand. Compared to the play in ‘station eleven’, this one was performed 12 months into the pandemic. At the pinnacle of the play is a message that our lives and that all that surrounds us is just made of straw.
On of the interesting metaphors that feature in the play is the idea that ideas are borrowed or echoed from others. The play explores this through music, the origins of baselines in hip-hop and the funk samples that made them. For me the underlying point here is to question the relationship we have with our own thoughts, and whether we even have the power to control them. Or like the bassline in ‘rapper’s delight’ is just the lending of Chic ‘good times’. I could be reading something into the play that wasn’t originally conceived, but to me the commentary is around the powerlessness of us all.
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