Dr Ruth Adams leads 'Gate Debate'

Dr Ruth Adams recently gave a talk called 'Fear and Loathing and Las Meninas: Radical Collage as political gesture and artistic practice' at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, a response to their current production 'I'd Rather Goya Robbed Me Of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole'.  

The play is a stream-of-consciousness rant by a father disillusioned by the superficial celebrity and commodity obsessed culture of late capitalism, who wants to give his young sons a taste of real life and real culture on a road trip, which culminates in a break in at the Prado for a drug-fuelled, late night party in front of Goya's 'Black Paintings'.  The sons, played in this production by scene-stealing micro-pigs, would rather go to Disneyland, however. 

Dr Adams' talk, and the discussion which followed, explored the themes of the play through art history, looking at the uses and 'abuses' of Goya by subsequent generations of artists, including Picasso, Dali and the Chapman Brothers, who notoriously 'rectified' a set of prints of Goya's 'Disasters of War' drawings.  It looked too at the use of shock in art, and in particular the potential of the 'explosive juxtapositions' of surrealism, beat literature, situationism and punk to foster a revolutionary consciousness in their audiences.

More information about the play is available on the theatre's website and blogpost:

 http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/blog/2014/03/dr-ruth-adams-fear-and-loathing-and-las-meninas