It's been a while since I went to straight theatre, and tonight's trip to the Almeida was the smallest theatre I have attended since that distinctly weird one above a pub in Turnham Green. I was sat next to the woman with the snorting foghorn. She laughed when other people didn't, especially when homophobic comments were being said that weren't actually funny. Every time she honked inappropriately people turned round to look/glare, only I was convinced they thought it was me, not her, honking.
Anyway, the play is about a man who after twenty years or more of happy/faithful marriage falls in love with a goat, and tells his best friend who tells his wife and son. This is the entire premise of the play. I wonder how it would have played if you didn't know beforehand that he was having an affair with a goat.
In between scenes I reflected what I would blog, and decided that I would say "What shocked me was not that I was disgusted that he was having sex with the goat, but that he had fallen in love with it; that seemed a perversion too far. What does that say about the stuff I have read in mainstream books eg by Nancy Friday about people having sex with animals, that it no longer has the power to shock? But the 'falling in love' is an anthromorphism too far."
Slight spoiler to comeThen, at the end, the main protagonist is kissing the blood-spattered carcass of Sylvia (the Goat) and I thought 'How vile, he's kissing the a dirty animal, that is physically revolting' - I had previously been dealing with the bestial act as an abstract. Then I thought, lots of people who have cats and dogs slobber and kiss them, which is pretty disgusting, too. Perhaps we often hover on the edge of taboo.
Incidentally Who Is Sylvia is a poem by Shakespeare with music by Schubert
