Ugly Review

Guest blogger Michael Jameson shares his experience of Emma Adam’s Ugly

Following conversations on Twitter with @culturevultures, I went to see Red Ladder’s latest production Ugly by Emma Adams at the Carriageworks. In return, I promised I would write about the experience. I wrote a review immediately after the show and published on my blog via twitter.  I collected my ticket early and discovered there were 4 empty seats next to me. These would shortly be filled by people I didn’t know, but I had talked to many times, in not more than 140 characters on Twitter.

My twitter friends arrived waved from the other side of the auditorium and we sat down to watch the play. I congratulate Red Ladder for their active online presence. I had read interesting blogs from the writer and director beforehand, watched a video from the rehearsal process. Along with regular tweets from behind the scenes @redladdertheatr there has been an online journey leading up to the play.
The Culture Vulture facilitated this social meet up and brought together friends “who didn’t know yet know each other” to watch a play and engage with work in a way that would not have been possible five years ago.

The play painted a dark world with only glimmers of hope. The characters were misfits, excluded, and often powerless. Any sense of community and indeed humanity had been destroyed by the struggle to survive.

The play raises lots of important questions and issues and I am encouraged by my experience that we can utilise art and social media to build communities who can come together to try to make sense of the world in which we live. At the end, we talked about what we had seen and headed home with the conversations on twitter already starting up again.

I joined in the lively after show discussion and found Red Ladder eager to provoke conversations, that lead to action, that lead to change. Red Ladder are successfully creating work and integrating social media to help them achieve their aim of quite literally changing the world.