Unicorns and Zombies
Mar. 8th, 2025 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearA few days ago, we went to see Unicorn at the Garrick Theatre. It had two points of interest for us - Dave and I both love Nicola Walker so it was a massive draw to be able to see her on stage (and well worth it), plus we're both interested in seeing how the representation of polyamory is developing in mainstream media.
The play is a three-hander. Nick and Polly are married, both in their 50s, with two kids - and both feel their relationship has gone a bit stale. Polly develops a crush on one of the students in her poetry class - Kate, who is 28 - and almost jokingly suggests they introduce Kate into their relationship as a third.
And things get interesting from there.
I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about the play on leaving the theatre. The acting was superlative, the writing was mostly excellent (Nick and Polly both felt very real and very relatable, though Kate much less so), and a lot of the themes and presentation of how this scenario might play out were thoughtful, funny, realistic and well portrayed.
There were aspects I was less keen on, though. And I felt sorry for the actress playing Kate, because she was basically the vehicle for the writer to get his message out, so she had quite a few rather clunky exposition speeches.
Overall, it prompted quite a bit of discussion - between me and Dave, between us and other people in the audience, and subsequently between us and several of our friends - so it was definitely a success on that front. In the end, it was more progressive than I'd feared but less progressive than I'd hoped. But I think that's definitely several steps in the right direction.
And Nicola Walker was awesome.
On the way home from the theatre, I decided to give up on reading The Twelve by Justin Cronin. I enjoyed the first book in this series - The Passage - when I read it in September, but I haven't felt like picking up the sequel since. And I found myself not wanting to pick it up after I started reading it, either. I don't think this is the book's fault. I'm very much not in the right mindset for apocalyptic stories at the moment - and I think the ship had sailed a bit for me with this series, as five months has erased most of the details of the first book from my brain and the momentum of the continuing story just wasn't there any more. I feel a bit bad about giving up, but then 2025 is the year of mood reading for me (I'm really trying to stop my brain from making it a competition so I can just relax and enjoy my reading, but it's not working at all) - and I'm just not in the mood for this at the moment. I thought about putting it back on my shelf to maybe try again another time - but the longer I leave it, the less likely I am to go back to it, because my memory of the first one is going to fade even more. So, probably not a bad book in the least, but it just wasn't going to work out for me, unfortunately.
The play is a three-hander. Nick and Polly are married, both in their 50s, with two kids - and both feel their relationship has gone a bit stale. Polly develops a crush on one of the students in her poetry class - Kate, who is 28 - and almost jokingly suggests they introduce Kate into their relationship as a third.
And things get interesting from there.
I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about the play on leaving the theatre. The acting was superlative, the writing was mostly excellent (Nick and Polly both felt very real and very relatable, though Kate much less so), and a lot of the themes and presentation of how this scenario might play out were thoughtful, funny, realistic and well portrayed.
There were aspects I was less keen on, though. And I felt sorry for the actress playing Kate, because she was basically the vehicle for the writer to get his message out, so she had quite a few rather clunky exposition speeches.
Overall, it prompted quite a bit of discussion - between me and Dave, between us and other people in the audience, and subsequently between us and several of our friends - so it was definitely a success on that front. In the end, it was more progressive than I'd feared but less progressive than I'd hoped. But I think that's definitely several steps in the right direction.
And Nicola Walker was awesome.
On the way home from the theatre, I decided to give up on reading The Twelve by Justin Cronin. I enjoyed the first book in this series - The Passage - when I read it in September, but I haven't felt like picking up the sequel since. And I found myself not wanting to pick it up after I started reading it, either. I don't think this is the book's fault. I'm very much not in the right mindset for apocalyptic stories at the moment - and I think the ship had sailed a bit for me with this series, as five months has erased most of the details of the first book from my brain and the momentum of the continuing story just wasn't there any more. I feel a bit bad about giving up, but then 2025 is the year of mood reading for me (I'm really trying to stop my brain from making it a competition so I can just relax and enjoy my reading, but it's not working at all) - and I'm just not in the mood for this at the moment. I thought about putting it back on my shelf to maybe try again another time - but the longer I leave it, the less likely I am to go back to it, because my memory of the first one is going to fade even more. So, probably not a bad book in the least, but it just wasn't going to work out for me, unfortunately.
