Existential Despair. Again

While I am not blaming Stewart Laing or Proto-Type Theatre, I am finding it hard to take joy in my existence in a hostile universe: both The Maids  and God, The Good and The Guillotine restated the French existentialist vision of a world careless towards the individual and the absence of intrinsic meaning. While the two plays offer very different solutions - The Maids craves death, with a side-order of personal ritual, 3G suggests a passive acceptance of circumstance - they share an unfaltering gaze into the abyss.

The Maids was written by Genet as a sort of brutal ritual, inflicting the antics of the oppressed on the audience to disorientate and disturb. Like Kane's Crave, it disrespects the boundaries of the fourth wall, not by addressing the audience, but by relocating the drama from stage into the mind of the viewer. The dizzying shifts of identity and gender, especially in the final scene when one of The Maids seems to be playing criminal and executioner at the same time, undermine the easy reading of the action: it's impossible to assess whether the slightly unengaged performances were a consequence of the actors' youth or a deliberate attempt to further alienate the performer from the script.

While Genet never aims for the taut precision of Camus, whose The Stranger inspired 3G, his language  is as disconcerting - a mixture of the eloquent, the gaudy and the blunt, it encourages the same sense of isolation and detachment. Unsettling and murderous, The Maids has left me in an existential fever, paranoid and exhausted.

God, The Good and The Guillotine - a work in progress, so full conclusions about its intentions must be tentative - didn't help. A ballad about the loss of a mobile phone made clear that Proto-Type are relocating Camus' alienation into a contemporary context. Technology is identified as the reason for the creeping sense of discomfort - in the source novel, the anti-hero's alienation is simply a reflection of his inability to feel emotion or see purpose.

There are works that celebrate the godlessness of existence, seeing the lack of absolute meaning as an opportunity for the individual to discover their own. As it stands, 3G is not one of those works. The most powerful moments - the phone song, the romping drinking song that is framed by blood splashing over the video screens - mismatch form and content to present alienation and present a world out of kilter with the individual.

These plays are undeniably powerful, but I am wondering whether I ought to cut back on the anguish. I know the circus is coming to town this week, and a few tricks and stunts must cheer me up. The problem with art is that if it is to be worth seeing, it needs to have an impact... but if the impact is so dark, I worry about the effect on my mental health.