Lily Through The Dark

Lily through the dark’, boring, pointless and tedious. I watched the performance at the university theatre on Newton park campus and I was thoroughly disappointed. The set although clever was very distracting and detracted from a lot of the action. The play itself didn’t hold my attention at all, what started as somewhat of a dark twisted fairy tale then quite randomly turned into slapstick comedy, which felt, was very amateur. The pointless change in mood gave a strange juxtaposition to the play and made me feel uncomfortable, I wasn’t quite sure whether or not to take it seriously anymore. One prominent issue throughout the play for me was the use of the puppet. I understood why they may have made that choice as the puppet probably was an easier way to convey the story in a smaller space, yet I feel although it spoilt the whole play. The puppet of course being an inanimate object made it very hard to be able to sympathise with .The play had so many deep rooted emotions which I feel would have been better portrayed with an actress. Two different actresses also took on the vocals of Lily which I again feel made you detach from emotional involvement which, in my opinion I felt the play really needed in order to work. Again another problem for me with the use of a puppet was that there were mistakes easily made, the puppets motivations and movements were manipulated through two of the actresses on stage and often noticeable mistakes were made, again totally distracting from the piece. All in all I felt ‘Lily through the dark ‘, which although may have started with a promising set and atmosphere was lacking of thought and cohesion from the cast and left me utterly disappointed.