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Issue Details: First known date: 2024... 2024 The Whole Truth : The Complications of ‘going Method’
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'THE FIRST TIME I tried to cry on cue, in a workshop intended for aspiring young actors, it did not work. It was 2006; I was eighteen years old and performing a rather ambitiousmonologue from Andrew Bovell’s After Dinner,in which forty-something Monika describes finding her husband dead in the living room. Naturally, dead husbands require real tears, and I assumed unashamed effort was the key to achieving them. I listened to sad music before I performed. I laboured every word. I chased – begged – the emotion like a hysterical teenage girl running after an ex-­lover at midnight. JUST COME HERE. PLEASE. By the end of the monologue, I was so frustrated I couldn’t make myself cry that I began to cry. When I finished, the teacher said, ‘I think that play is supposed to be a comedy.’'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review Attachment Styles no. 84 7th May 2024 28205623 2024 periodical issue

    'The attachments we form shape our experience of the world and our understanding of who we are. ‘Hell is other people,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, his point being less about misanthropy and more about how entwined our self-perception is with the ways in which others perceive us. And alongside our personal relationships – from filial to friendship, from collegiate to romantic – sit the complex emotional connections we form with places, ideas and objects. How do we navigate these varying attachments, and what can they offer us when our lives are so mediated by technology? Can we break free of the tropes and traps associated with our most primal relationships: the social expectations of motherhood, the burdens of filial duty, the complexities of infidelity?' (Publication summary)

    2024
Last amended 4 Jun 2024 13:17:18
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