mardi 25 novembre 2014

Sally Morgan

So... I have just got back from seeing Sally Morgan at Wolverhampton Civic Centre. I went with two people who I think broadly believed in her ability to commune with the dead.



I have to say, some of the preconceptions I had were altered by the show.



I did not expect to receive a message from a dead relative, or to see proof of anyone else doing so, but I did hold a basic position that what she was doing was providing comfort to people struggling with loss or doubt, that her "messages" would be benign and supportive, and that she was doing nobody any harm.



That was not how I felt watching the show. To me it seemed exploitative and demeaning to the people who received the "messages". A few people were reduced to tears, but most were just left perplexed as she reeled off generic references that made no connection. Which is the second problem... as theatre it did not work at all.



I saw no real evidence of fakery, but then again I saw no real evidence of anything other than the lady standing at the front of the stage reeling out names and then missed connections. Only 3 or 4 of the 20 or so people who picked themselves out seemed to in any way believe what they had heard, and if every case I think this was because their sense of grief was raw,



If I was doing a show like this, there are a number of things I would think of... planting people in the audience to have "home run" hits with, scanning the "love letters" people put in the box before the show to glean info to exploit later on, having members of staff mill around before the show to pick up pieces of info that people were hoping to get and feed it to me. I mean, none of those are complex or clever. Thats surely what anyone would do with a captive audience of people desperate to want to believe.



And I didnt see anything like that.



She didnt make one connection that seemed to me to be more than a lucky guess or just utterly generic (someone who committed suicide might have been a loner, someone who died after their fourth stroke felt ill for a while, etc etc...)



A few people leapt to join the dots she threw in the air (my grandmother was called Nettie and she lived at number 26 and her father was called Joe and he smoked!) - but most people just couldnt pick anything out from what she was saying.



_



All in all, I was disappointed (as it was not a good piece of theatre in any sense) and I feel far more disapproving of it all. I dont think what she does would help anyone come to terms with loss in any sense, it is just making a mockery of their grief.





via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1zrU0Qq

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire