![]() I find it hard to articulate what it was about Pomona that I loved so much. ![]() I’m so sick of that Strong Woman trend in fiction at the moment where for female characters to be heroes, they have to have basically no emotions at all. When we first see her, she’s freaking out, but she’s smart and courageous and in the end she puts herself at risk to do the things that need to get done. Fay in particular felt like a fascinatingly layered character to me – I love when women are permitted by a writer to be scared and brave at the same time. If anything, I have to say, I liked how McDowall wrote the women here, and the fact that although two of his lead female characters were prostitutes, he managed to write about prostitution in a way that felt realistic without being maudlin or moralising. Luckily for me, I didn’t take issue with any of the gender stuff in this. But I don’t know, I can see how it’s a horror particularly aimed at women and if the gender politics bother you in something, that’s it, they bother you it’s not like you can switch off that part of your brain when you’re watching something. Because they already have a terrible theory that doesn’t stop them doing those jobs, but the reality is even worse, and it’s hard to sell the idea that everything terrible is real, that everything is WORSE than you imagine without having something genuinely hideous at the bottom of the pile, or the end of that sentence. Lauren Mooney: Personally, I don’t see that reveal as being an “easy shorthand for horror” – to me, it’s supposed to be the very worst thing, the most awful thing you can imagine, not just tossed off lightly. But then again I didn’t feel particularly keen on my first Philip Ridley play either. But it didn’t leave me with the excitement that others felt. My brain slowed and I was left with a heavy darkness I could not shake off. Instead I left puzzled but without that immediate curiosity to pour back through the story and see how this twist was laid out. Or something. With the circular nature of the play, I wanted to have that moment like when the vacuum cleaner cord zips back into the vacuum….you race through your memories of the play and suddenly all the little facts and details click into a new focus and you want to start the play all over again immediately to see how it adds up. If I had felt the play make a statement about this or take a perspective. It might not have chafed so much had I felt that aspect of the plot added up to more for me. And that for me was the play’s greatest strength.īut then I had a nagging feeling about the play. Did we need a dystopian plot where reproductive violence against women is an “easy” shorthand for horror? Particularly in a piece where the male characters seemed substantially more fleshed out than the female characters. And there was a childlike humanity in the midst of all this darkness–a craving for simple things–a friend, someone to trust, an ally. In fact I think that’s why I liked the use of D&D too. And did so in a nice lo-fi surveillance state way without an emphasis on technology that seems a little overdone on stage these days. Ultimately, I loved the design aesthetic and having it take place in a literal sewer with all these characters circling the drain. Having Zeppo as the constant observer and the cast hang out about the fringes of the room almost all of the time kept the gritty, paranoia of the piece present. When there was nary a jolt, I wondered what I was missing. Nicole Serratore: I’m probably going to be the dissenter in this conversation but perhaps because everyone had prepared me for something electric I kept waiting to have my genitals electrocuted by the play. When we walked out, my companion said to me “I’m not quite sure what we just watched,” and that’s what’s so brilliant about it. It’s fantastical yet contains at its festering heart an awful truth. ![]() It’s horrific and stomach-churning and properly fucking dark, but also full of humour and compassion. Or, more accurately, it feels as though Pomona has been sculpted from the fag ends of collective culture, made out of all this stuff we just have lying around at the edges of our consciousness. But it’s also to do with how play and production mash-up genres and even art forms, effortlessly splicing in pop cultural references. Part of that is the intertwining of game and reality, truth and fiction, which are tangled together in endlessly mind-itching ways. Catherine Love: What really got my pulse racing about Pomona was its refusal to settle down into one identifiable shape.
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