JS:TO hits Cambridge
Jerry Springer:The Opera is continuing it’s UK tour, and is currently performing in Cambridge. The Cambridge Evening News reports on the protests. You can probably guess the quotes from the protesters, but the article is worth a read anyway, as after the report on the protests comes a review of the show, and the writer of the article evidently loved it, saying:
I’m pretty sure that even the individuals protesting outside the venue wouldn’t have been able to resist a smile at the hilarious antics on stage if they’d got themselves tickets.
While they were standing outside predicting the imminent descent of our souls into a fiery hell we were all inside rolling in the aisles. Writers Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee haven’t just ripped up the opera rule book, they’ve drop kicked it into an industrial paper shredder.
Speaking of the writers, Richard Thomas is also quoted in the first part of the article, saying:
I still to this day have absolutely no idea what all the fuss is about. I’m bewildered, it feels like I have stepped back a century.
Following the article about the protests with a glowing review of the show is a masterpiece of editing, and I suspect the writer may just have done it on purpose. He clearly wasn’t impressed with the protests. I’ll leave the last word to the reviewer from the newspaper, who almost perfectly sums up the show in two brief paragraphs:
If you take it as an examination of the excesses of popular culture then it works. Or perhaps you prefer to look on it as the story of a man struggling to balance the ethical dilemmas of his life.
Failing that you could just sit back and soak up the hilarious sight of opera singing rednecks trying to outdo each other with deliciously colourful insults.
Even if Jerry Springer: The Opera were a deliberate attempt to offend Christians and had been written for no other purpose (and, although not a Christian, I’d be a tad uncomfortable with that), it would be a great entertainment. I saw it only on TV, but enjoyed it throroughly. It astounds me (maybe part of my brain is missing) that these people – many of whom are educated, articulate, thinking, aware human beings – can fail to see that the second act is all about exploring the worst aspects of this type of TV and using religion as a magnifying glass to do that; they just cannot see that it is metaphor, yet their putative ‘saviour’ used metaphor (assuming he existed) all the time in his parables. You’d think they’d be happy that their belief system was being used to show up the crassness of trash TV. The mind boggles.
Andy, these people believe in life ever after & a supreme being, it’s them that have the mental problems not us.
Andy – but this is the problem; most of the complainers have never seen the play, and have no desire to do so. As they’re so fond of saying, “you don’t have to visit a pigsty to know that it stinks”. Of course, when I suggest that the flipside of this is that I don’t actually have to listen to anything an evangelical Christian says in order to know they’re a deranged bigot, suddenly I’m some sort of nazi. Hey ho.
Yeah, fellas, it’s depressing, isn’t it? I think I was asking the qustion rhetorically, just thinking in print, really. It’s baffling, really – cognitive dissonance. Aaaagh! and all that.