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May 12, 2004
Lay Down in the Web of the Black Spider...
by Ron HoganMarianne Faithful is about to star in a new production of The Black Rider at the Barbican. She tells Guardian readers what a great job William S. Burroughs did when he wrote it and manages to completely avoid mentioning the fact that it was a collaboration with Tom Waits. (Director Robert Wilson does get a nod: "this is a completely new theatrical language for me: it's not naturalistic, it's unnaturalistic, all about space and how you use it.")
I found a New Yorker review of the 1994 production, if you can deal with the screwed up coloring system on the page.
I just walked out of the production of this "thing" at Barbican. Now I am no prude or conservative, in fact my tastes tend to be radical and I don't believe that music or theatre need be beautiful, that said Black Rider is the worst piece of shit I could image being stagged. The narration is stupid, the story line confusing, the music gets under one's skin. It looks like an utterly failure drama project of a junior college.
Posted by: Bob at May 23, 2004 05:32 AMyour PayPal donation
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