Episode 885: Best Before

Went to see Rimini Protokoll's Best Before at the Arts Centre with Bella. For an explanation of what this game/play is like, go here. We thought it would be really pretentious, but it turned out to be quite fun. Some of the actors' anecdotes felt a bit banal, but I guess that may have been the point. Life isn't always one interesting incident after another, but if there's one thing the production did do, it was to drive home the fact that life is a series of choices. It would be overly simplistic to say that Bestland was a perfect analogy for life, but it provided an adequate approximation for reflecting the choices available to us in life and how the consequences can play out. Randomly, I managed to get myself elected President of Bestland. Then I decided to become a dictator by suspending elections. (To be fair, I would have been a benevolent dictator. Give me some credit here, given where I was born and raised.) So I was overthrown in a coup, though my fellow players chose to spare my life. They did, however, exile me out of the game, so 'Fred' was the first player out of Bestland. I'm actually really tempted to check and see if the Arts Centre still has free tickets for the Saturday performance. If they do, I might pop down before Reece's birthday thing and see if I can get elected President again, and this time, manipulate my way into remaining in power. If the actors help by casting me as the 'family values' candidate again, I could probably make it. The key is to be quick enough and jump onto the platform when nominations open, which for me, happened quite by accident. Kudos, by the way, to the couple that survived till 109 at the end of the night, when they managed to hold out against the in-game wind blowing them to their death on one side of the screen!