Younger, I used to wonder quite frequently at the oddness of my dreams. Where did they come from? Sometimes the symbolism would be all too obvious, but then at other times the narrative presented would be all too strange, and self-contained, to be the random firings of my brain cells, or even a hidden message from my subconcious (clever as it is). Of course, the meaning isn't always obvious from within. I remember once a friend of mine said she'd dreamt that a giant spider had laid eggs on her abdomen and they'd erupted into thousands of tiny little spiders that started to consume her. She said she had no idea what it meant. I thought it was obvious and said she was clearly anxious about getting pregnant. The look of realisation on her face was quite something, like I'd smashed a door down and light streamed in- even though I couldn't understand why that wouldn't have been the first thing she'd thought of. Maybe our subconcious hides things from us because it's afraid to look straight at them.

Last night I fell asleep listening to PseudoPod, the horror short-story podcast. The story was called 'BagMan', which was about a the vengeful ghost of a child that went around turning criminal's brains to mush. Which no-one had much of a problem with, until all the criminals were gone and the ghost's bar for evil dropped. I tell you this not to recommend it, just to add more information. I wonder if listening to stories before you sleep encourages one's brain to dream in a more storylike fashion.

This morning I dreamt that I went to a sort of upper-class private (I guess the English would call it public, confusingly) school, of the sort that wears blazers and pins and plays polo and claps fingers-to-palm. Not that I've ever attended such a school before, but I've certainly seen plenty of shows in which people do. However this school enforced discipline via a device called 'The Impeller', which, as the name implies, impelled people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. It wasn't clear how it functioned (I never saw the device, but the general fear of it was present throughout all aspects of school life), but it seemed clear that when you were being impelled, it also hurt. So if you imagine private schools with blazers and pins as generally buttoned-down places, you can imagine how this particular school was even more buttoned down than that, nobody wanted to step even slightly out-of-line, for fear of being impelled back in.

Everyone except for me, that is. I had a small plastic bracelet (one of those one that it used for labelling things, like it had a little slot for a piece of paper, on mine was written, in pen in big blocky letters: "wave") which protected me from the impeller's effects, so while everyone else lived in fear of being bought back in line, I naturally flaunted my protection from its authority, stepping out of line, making cracks, leaning back in my chair, generally being the Randall P. McMurphy of the campus (at least, in my own eyes- who knows how others saw me).

A good portion of the dream, which I will not recount here, involved a sort of chase between myself and the (horribly stereotypical I'm afraid, old men with round glasses, loose skin and square hats) dons of the school, who would regularly catch me and lock me up, but since they relied on the power of the impeller to bring students in line, they were a little unsure what to do with me once I was in detention- the moment they left me alone, I'd just walk out and the chase would begin anew. Eventually one of them figured out that my tacky talisman was the font of my special protection, at which point I realized I was in serious trouble (a good deal of resentment had built up towards me in the faculty, due in large part to having chased me around so ineffectually) and now was the time to go AWOL from the school- permanently.

I enlisted a friend of mine to help me escape (what help I needed from him I can't recall- in fact I'm losing dreambits by the second as I write this, in something of a flurry I'll admit), we were hiding out in his dorm and he gave me some hot spicy tea -the bastard- which promptly knocked me out. I remember feeling very betrayed and seeing all the angles of the objects in the room being made out of words.

I came to in a darkened room, my bracelet gone, sitting on a wooden chair. There was no-one else in the room, but they used the impeller on me anyway, making me do horrible things to myself, hurting all the while.

Waking up feeling uneasy was something of a relief.

Rock'n'Roll is a new Tom Stoppard/Trevor Nunn collaboration I saw last night and have been pleasantly musing on since. Rock'n'Roll is probably not a great title, it's certainly not about Rock'n'Roll, although it certainly plays a huge role, indeed each scene transition is accompanied by a song from the era*, while the artists behind the song are projected onto the stage curtain.

Okay, so maybe it is about Rock'n'Roll, but it's about a lot of other things, as well- it's quite complex, as I heard a fellow theatre-goer say to another during the half-time break. What the play is more specifically about is the relationship between a Czechoslovakian man (Jan, played by Rufus Sewell) and three generations of the Morrows, a family living in Cambridge under the patriarch Max (played by an awesome Brian Cox). Max and his wife Eleanor (Sinead Cusack) and daughter Esme are all tied to Max's house in Cambridge, where he lectures others on his faith in Communism, a theory he believes is perfect in theory, humans just need to put it into practice correctly.

Jan on the other hand spends most of the play in Prague, where his faith is in rock'n'roll, while he watches communism devolve his government into an oppressive regime, cracking down on his beloved Plastic People of the Universe. Max's theory vs' Jan's experience. Some of the most crackling scenes are when Jan visits Max or vice versa, when Max continues to dogedly believe in his theory (indeed, he makes a fairly convincing argument for it), despite the obvious evidence that it's simply not working.

The play continues to focus on the idea of theory vs. practice, in all manner of systems. While Max argues passionately for communism he also posits that the human brain is simply a biological machine, something Eleanor does not want to hear as she is slowly being taken apart by cancer, wants desperately to believe in something more. I actually found these scenes quite tough to get through, as my own mum has also been through similar trials recently. Each scene jumps forward several years, so it's not much of a spoiler to say that by the second act, Eleanor has passed on. In an interesting generational twist, Sinead Cusack then takes on the role of Eleanor's daughter Esme, and the actress who played Esme in the first act switches roles to play Emily, Esme's daughter. (Not entirely sure why the male actors were spared this jump, possibly because their characters simply refused to move on?) In any case, it's a little odd to see Brian Cox interacting with the same actress who had been playing his wife, now playing his daughter.

While the first act revolved around Jan's return to Prague from Cambridge (where he studied under Max), the second is about his return to Cambridge, where the various plot threads culminate in a barnstorming (and ultimately quite hilarious) dinner sequence complete with smashed glasses, brandished knives and Syd Barrett being used to beat a wicked stepmother. "But it was all going so well..." Max deadpans.

The production values are excellent, a revolving stage making the action-jumps from Prague to Cambridge clean and interesting- at one point even employing a 'split-screen' effect where action in both cities takes place simultaneously. Sewell speaks in and English accent when he is speaking in Prague, but then switches to a Czech accent when he is in England, to highlight how others hear him when he is in their space. In Prague Jan is boisterous, verbose and music-obsessed; in England he is quiet and overly polite. Speaking of verbosity, it's written at a cracking pace- there are more ideas in one burst of dialogue than a lot of plays have in entirety.

Great production that is running to the end of September so I'd recommend you check it out.**

d

via Babs. Yes, my blog is totally lame as of late. Yes, I am okay with that.

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