Realism

Description

A lazy Saturday for Stuart? With interruptions from a radio panel show, a threesome, the Black and White Minstrels, a nagging mother and a mouthy cat - no chance. Luckily, none of them know what he's thinking . . . Realism is an exquisite, surreal trip inside the mind of one man during an ordinary day. However, it veers off from the commonplace to become a deliriously comic trip inside his wayward imagination. Dreams and daydreams are brought to life to hilarious effect exposing the faultlines between everyday life and the world of the imagination in which fantasies ignore conventions of taste and political correctness. This is Anthony Neilson's follow-up to his multi award-winning The Wonderful World of Dissocia. The text was published to coincide with its English premiere at the Soho Theatre in June 2011.

Renowned for his pioneering, ground-breaking and imaginative new work, Anthony Neilson is one of the most prominent voices in British theatre. His plays include Penetrator, Heredity, The Lying Kind and The Censor, which won the Writers Guild and Time Out Award (all for the Royal Court). His other work includes Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness (Headlong Theatre), Stitching (The Traverse, The Bush - Time Out Off West End Award) and Normal (Edinburgh Festival). His films include The Debt Collector and Deeper Still.

If Waiting for Godot is a play in which, as one critic had it, "nothing happens, twice", Realism is a play in which nothing happens, spectacularly. Anthony Neilson's comedy, previously seen at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, is a tale of inertia and of daydream - two potential ways to lose an audience for the price of one. But the result is wildly inventive, always entertaining, and ultimately rather moving too... The fireworks are fun. But Realism has an emotional undertow that makes it more than just a novelty item. -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times * Anthony Neilson's ingenious play...invades the prosaic kitchen-sink existence of its troubled, bachelor-hero...with all kinds of surreal, day dreamy carry-on. -- Dominic Cavendish * Daily Telegraph * Anthony Neilson's surprisingly moving musings on mundanity, the absurdities of modern life and "the accumulation of losses" that we must carry with us as we age is a sparky and often scurrilous 80 minutes that, in worming inside one's head, worms inside our own. -- Lyn Gardner * Guardian * An exquisite tragi-comedy for our times . . . It should strike a chord with anyone who's ever struggled to make sense of the modern world and their place in it. An absolute joy from start to finish * Herald *