For a Better World

For A Better World by Roland Schimmelpfennig opened last week. It is directed by Daisy Noyes and as she says, "For a Better World is not a "well-made play"! In some ways it is not a play at all, written for radio, without the restictions of physical staging, it travels across time and place, ducking in and out of the future, the past, memory, reality and fantasy. It is an excessive, sprawling text, a baroque roller coaster that doesn't so much explore its themes of sex and death, as hurtle past them."
You need to have read that paragraph before you go and see this as it is not an easy play or not a play to follow; so you know it is not you being dumb!  To me it was as if Roland Schimmelpfennig had taken LSD and the trip got more and more surreal as he wrote the script! I don't agree about the excessive sprawling text; a couple of times maybe but I wouldn't say it was that excessive, I certainly couldn't have fallen asleep, I was too busy trying to make sense of it all. It was a play about a group of solders in the jungle, they had swapped their uniforms for bikinis and underwear. There are aliens, there is sex (suggested) there is blood and dying. None of these are really explored as in a traditional play but as Daisy says they just happen and that's it!

Daisy did a good job at pulling off such a difficult play to stage and the actors did a great job at building suspense, with hints of humour. They were certainly very fit, with military training and pole dancing!
The play comes with every warning possible - nudity, smoke, 1herbal cigarette, strobe lighting, feathers, cause language ... there could have been more!
So, I hope you can gather from this, it is a concoction of events mished together to form something entertaining. It is certainly a play you don't forget in a hurry as you will keep trying to make some sense from it all! If you work it out, let me know.