BETRAYAL, CATHARSIS AND A MOTHERF***KER WITH THE HAT

I just want to give you a heads up – this may turn into a play review blog at some point. Oh I still watch films. I will still be uploading film reviews for a while yet. I have several “ready to go” just in case as we speak. There will be more, from cinemas, from DVDs and from the past, like last week. But this whole theatre thing is just… Acting is just… I don’t know man. It’s changing me. It’s altering me as a person and it’s doing it in the best way possible. I’ve never spoken to you guys - though goodness knows I have almost begged you to comment and talk to me – but  the stats all tell me you’re out there though and that you keep coming back. It’s been a good few years for at least some of you so you know, I consider y’all friends. So I don’t mind telling you all of this. I don’t know, there are moments, or indeed entire days where I feel the exercises, the work, the plays and the playing shakes loose and shakes out bad stuff that have been clinging to my insides for years. I don’t know man,  this is a very strange time in my life. But I love the journey and am on and can only imagine it leading somewhere good. 

I got into writing all of that because watching The Motherf***ker with the hat was so cathartic. The play is unashamedly big and loud, tackling heavy subjects like addiction, betrayal, relationships that are breaking down and love lost and found, the play storms onto the stage from the first minute, laughing, crying, howling and stamping its feet. And the conviction is such, the characters are so real and the story so gripping that from the first moment, you as the audience members get swept up in the whirlwind of emotions it portrays…

Our hero is Jackie ( Ricardo Chavira). He has just come out of prison and is on the way to kicking his alcohol addiction. He lives with his girlfriend Victoria (Flor De Liz perez), with whom he has been together since 8^th grade, he has just found a job… In short, Jackie’s finally on the home straight – or so it seems… Until he gets home one day… And there’s this hat… What follows next is Jackie’s attempts to get his life back under control. Because if he loses it… Well he may very well loose it for good…

Ok, I’m going to try and write the following analysis with as few spoilers as possible. But be warned, I may miss a trick. In which case I apologise.

It is interesting to watch Jackie go through several different types of betrayal . First there is the betrayal on the romantic side. Well, it’s horrendous and it’s painful but we have all been there,  right (well, quite a few of us have)? It’s one of the main reasons a relationship receives a blow. Sometimes the relationship heals, sometimes we move on, but at least we’re kinda ready for it…

What we are, more often than not less ready for is betrayal from our heroes. The people we set up in our heads as examples. This can be one of many things, it can either be your celebrity idol you meet one day and turns out to be a complete jerk or someone in your life that you idolise and hold on to in some way and you wake up one fine day and realise that this person was only human, just like you. And do you know what; they may not even be a particularly nice human. That’s normally to be expected, after all it’s a distinct possibility with humans… But where does that leave you if they are the person you modelled yourself on for any amount of time? If you turned into something unpleasant without noticing it, that’s definitely one problem… It can feel like quite a kick in the teeth though if the person you were imitating was in fact a complete front… 

Now if I told you that the play tackled issues like this in the context of addiction and prison, and that it does it in two hours without a single recess, you may be forgiven for thinking it would be incredibly heavy and hard to watch. It’s not. The play expertly points out the absurd and the right out hilarious in the potentially “heaviest” situations. And if those aren’t quite enough for you, there is Julio (Yul Vazquez) . While he is clearly there for comic relief, he still successfully walks the line between the serious and the hilarious. On the night I watched, in some scenes practically every line he uttered was greeted with laughter. And yet he was never, ever “absurd”. He was just what the otherwise quite heavy and emotional content of the play needed.   

I have so much more to say about this play. It definitely did NOT receive six Tony nominations for nothing… I haven’t even got round to Alec Newman who was awesome but whose character I can’t really mention (I mean I can but you know, it’s tricky) for plot twist reasons. Then there is the scenery and how the transitions take place on stage between scenes but I want that to come as a complete surprise too.

In short, this is one of the most powerful plays I have seen in a very long time. And as I write this review it has just under a week left at the National Theatre in London with the run ending on the 20th. I’d say don’t miss it.