In my latest weekly jaunt to the theatre I sat down for a comedy from the Video Game Theatre Players, entitled Final Fantasy X.
As a person who has built a life in and around the theatre, I have been pleased to be moved to tears many a time by a tragedy played out in the round, or the black box. This week I was moved to tears by laughter, a far more difficult feat.
It is so easy to feel pathos for the human condition when someone makes tears, or their mouth turns down and they are sad. It is much much harder to access that effervescent feeling: laugh.
To laugh is to momentarily unhinge yourself from the heaviness of the flesh world, and exist on a bubbling ethereal plane. This is the message that Yuna, played by Allegra Frank, teaches to Tidus in the Video Game Theatre Players’ rendition of Final Fantasy X. Frank, with a gravity that belies her age, guides the young Tidus through his lessons in laughing.
Tidus is, of course, played by Simone de Rochefort (no relation to myself), a Video Game Theatre regular. I asked her if it was difficult to play a character with a laugh so different to her own.
“Is this what it’s supposed to be like?” she asked me, with tears in her eyes. “Is this normal?”
To hear the true, naturalistic laughs of Tidus and Yuna, please watch this episode of Video Game Theatre. Previous episodes are on our YouTube channel, and linked below:
