Rare Ships

A bit of a catch-up on two things I watched recently through National Theatre at Home:

Good (directed by Dominic Cooke) is a 2022 production of the 1981 play by Cecil Philip Taylor, about a professor in pre-war Germany whose decisions take him from a life as a progressive academic and family man whose closest friend is Jewish to an active contributor to the Final Solution.

The production stars David Tennant as protagonist John Halder, with Sharon Small and Elliot Levey playing virtually all other characters. I don't know if that's the norm for this play, but having the people around Halder share faces was extremely effective in bringing home the self-centeredness that guides his actions and the way he conceives of people in his life by the role they play in his conception of himself. Tennant, Small, and Levey all turn in fantastic performances, but Levey in particular just knocked it out of the park, especially in a scene near the end that differs slightly from the original play in a way that hit even harder for me. This was really something special.



The Estate (directed by Daniel Raggett) is the debut play from Shaan Sahota, starring Adeel Akhtar as MP Angad Singh—the unexpected frontrunner for party leadership on a platform of change—whose image of himself as the underdog progressive son of a working class father is put to the test when his father dies, leaving a significant estate to him with nothing going to his older sisters on the basis of sex.

There was some unevenness across the performances, a key moment at the climax kind of wobbled for me, and I personally think the political elements would have worked a lot better if this had maybe been set in the 2010s (because specifically name-checking it as 2025 just drove home the ways it doesn't resemble the political climate of the moment), but it was firing on all cylinders when it came to the family drama, the poison of unexamined privilege and unspoken trauma, and the pressure to keep conflicts in marginalized communities out of the public eye even if it means demanding more sacrifices from the more vulnerable members of that community. Adeel Akhtar's performance was incredibly impressive given all of the ugly and painful things that come out of Angad over the course of the play, and Thusitha Jayasundera (playing Angad's eldest sister, Gyan) was an immediate "Oh, I need to see more of what she's been in." Also, the staging and music were great and made me really wish I'd been able to see this one in person.

Last year, as an interstitial segment on Game Changer, the folks over at Dropout.tv filmed an improv skit called Dimension 20: On a Bus, where the concept was four professional GMs sitting down to play D&D with a GM who had a limited understanding of how the game was played.



It was a funny bit, but I don't think anyone expected the calls for more to actually result in anything. Until now, when for April Fool's Day, Dropout released a full one-hour episode of it. It's only up on their streaming service, but here's the teaser trailer that dropped without warning:



And man, the actual episode did not disappoint. It was a hilarious mess that hit just the right balance of winding up a bunch of professional storytellers, but also letting them do what they best as they tried to salvage things. I laughed to the point of tears, but I also legitimately picked up pointers about character-building and how to move a plot along (to get to LAX to fly out to an M&M wedding in Lisbon when everything keeps blowing up).