Did I mention that The Antiquer and I went out to the theatre on Friday night and got stuck watching the wrong play? We'd gone to see The Haunting of Daniel Gartrell but wandered by accident into The Last 5 Years, a musical and quite the dollop of excrement.
I won't explain the mechanics of how we ended up in the wrong place, but we had only seconds to squeeze into our seats - the last two seats left in the place; what are the odds? - before the curtain went up. I was still confused as to how we had tickets with allocated seating but once in the room people just grabbed whatever seats there were, when a couple walked out on to the stage and kissed and then the woman burst into some hideous, maudlin song.
The Antiquer and I looked at each other in mutual horror as it dawned on us that we weren't where we were supposed to be. This was followed immediately by me doubling over in my seat trying desperately not to burst into hysterical laughter. I was like that for two or three minutes. It was dreadful. The theatre we were in was an intimate little number, with the stage on the same level as the seating, the two actors only a metre or so from us. At one point I thought I had myself under control only to sit up and see the actress staring straight at me as she sang her vile, heartfelt tune. This was enough to set me off again. I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to hold it in any longer.
The Antiquer told me later he had a contingency plan in place if I finally burst into loud, unrestrained laughter. Hoping that wild laughing can look a lot like wild sobbing he was going to have me up on my feet and shoving me out of the place saying, "Sorry, sorry. We've had a death in the family and we thought, well, let's come out, maybe we'll enjoy the night, but as you can see..." As it was, there was no escape and, even worse, no intermission, so we had to sit through the complete horror. What really got The Antiquer's goat was that a couple of times I kind of zoned out and began to applaud songs when they were over.
However, kudos to the Subiaco Arts Centre. They rang me the next day to say they'd arranged tickets for us to see the play we'd originally planned to see. If it turns out that one sucks too then we've got no one to blame but ourselves.
2 comments:
oh I am SO SORRY. There is clearly no god, when something like that can happen right out of the blue.
We should have changed places completely. I went along to see a comedian at the Subiaco Community Centre that could have used at least somebody in the audience laughing. Fortunately, the tickets were free since we had seen him in the Llama bar and he had promised that if we went to his actual show he would be better.....sadly, he was not.
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