Bliss
Royal Court
Peter Pan, El Musical
Garrick
The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
Almeida
The Royal Court’s anointed one, Caryl Churchill, has translated a new play, Bliss, by the Canadian writer Olivier Choinière. Bliss goes like this. Four shelf-stackers dressed in supermarket fatigues stand in a communal lavatory. They narrate a long dreary tale about Céline Dion, her family and some journalists. After half an hour, there’s a new story. A pregnant woman, whose body lacks genital or cloacal apertures, is forced to give birth by firing the foetus through her sealed rectum while she explodes. At least I think that’s what it was about. When their tales end so does the play. Bliss! What an absurd weightless babblefest. And how crazy to break one of the theatre’s first principles: make the action immediate.
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