pedanther

Long service leave is over, and I'm back at work. The first few days were busy as I caught up with what had been done in my absence, but then things settled back into the old rhythm. I briefly considered blagging some extra time off on account of respiratory interestingness, and would have if I still shared a working space with other people, but since I work from home there's not a risk of sharing infection, and I was awake and alert enough to do the work, so I decided that it would be better to be back on duty when people were expecting me to be back.

The lingering cough has continued to linger, but is mostly gone now.

I've caught up with the random monthly reading challenge, finishing off my October book (This Is Improbable) and November book (The Sword of Islam). The challenge for December is to read one of the five longest (by page count) books on the to-read list, which seems just a bit rude for the challenge that starts only one month before the final deadline. (To be fair, the rules of the challenge actually allow doing the prompts in any order, so there's nothing stopping someone choosing a book for this prompt in January and spending the entire year on it. Still.) The five books on my to-read shelf with the largest page counts are mostly omnibus editions - a complete works of Shakespeare, a complete novels of Austen, and Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume - plus one novel, The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton, and a 1981 edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

I've also started catching up with Natural Six, which I'd been keeping up with easily during long service leave but then fell a couple of episodes behind when I had the lurgy and lacked the concentration to watch three-hour-long episodes. I expect to be caught up before the next episode comes out, but then I'll be dealing with the issue of being back at work and having significantly fewer three-hour blocks of free time in a week, so I might fall behind again.

I haven't resumed doing 750 Words yet; my current plan is to write off November and start again fresh on the first day of December.

Fiction books
Sarah Gailey. River of Teeth (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Fifth Elephant (e) (re-read)
Cat Sebastian. The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (e)

In progress
Alexandre Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo (e) (re-read)
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (e) (re-read)
CN & AM Williamson. The Lightning Conductor (e)

Picture books
Kathryn Otoshi. Zero
Lynne Truss, Bonnie Timmons. Twenty-Odd Ducks

Non-fiction books
Simon Bucher-Jones. The Black Archive: Image of the Fendahl (e)

In progress
AC Grayling. The Good Book
Hallie Rubenhold. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
William Shakespeare, ed. GR Hibbard. The Oxford Shakespeare Hamlet

Fiction books
Ben Aaronovitch. Amongst Our Weapons (e)
Raymond Chandler. The High Window
Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White (e)
Tim Powers. Alternate Routes (e) (re-read)
Tim Powers. Forced Perspectives (e) (re-read)
Tim Powers. Stolen Skies (e)

Picture books
Neil Gaiman, Lorenzo Mattotti. Hansel and Gretel

Non-fiction books
Terrance Dicks, Ray Jelliffe. A Riot of Writers
Richard P Feynman. The Meaning of It All

In progress
Margaret Scott. A Little More (e)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Timberlake Wertenbaker. Our Country's Good

...and, as is sometimes the case, as soon as I said definitely that I didn't think I'd be watching any more of the theatre streams, the brain weasels packed up and went on holiday and I was finally able to watch the stream of The Winter's Tale that I've been putting off for a couple of months.

This is the other stream of The Winter's Tale, the one from Cheek by Jowl, which means that it's now happened twice in the past year that I've seen two productions of a problem play where the first production was in a Globe-replica theatre and leaned comedic and the second production was by Cheek by Jowl and leaned dramatic/discomforting.

This one wasn't as unrelenting as the Cheek by Jowl production of Measure for Measure: it did keep some of the comedy of the Bohemian scenes, and there was a satisfying ending. ( Read more... )

I'm not entirely certain whether I liked it, all things considered and taking the bad with the good, but I am entirely certain that I'm glad I watched it; it was an experience worth acquiring.

(And now that I've stopped procrastinating over that one stream, does that mean I'll start watching others again? I don't know, and I don't intend to think about it too hard in case I attract the notice of the brain weasels again. We'll just have to wait and see.)

Fiction books
Lois McMaster Bujold. Penric's Travels (e)
Terry Pratchett. The Shepherd's Crown
Rafael Sabatini. Scaramouche (e)
Jean Webster. Daddy-Long-Legs (e)
Andy Weir. The Martian (e) (re-read)

In progress
(anthology). Batman Black and White, volume 2 (re-read)

In hiatus
Caroline Stevermer. The Glass Magician (e)

Non-fiction books
(none)

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Rex Stout. Fer-de-Lance

Thoughts on some more of the theatrical productions that have been made available online for people stuck at home:

. Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017: ( Read more... )

. Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe, 2009: ( Read more... )

. King Lear, Stratford Festival of Canada, 2014: ( Read more... )

. Measure for Measure, Cheek by Jowl, 2015 (available until 25 May): ( Buckle in, this is a long one )

. Here's an opportunity which I'm not sure I'll take: there are currently two different theatre groups offering streams of The Winter's Tale -- one from Cheek by Jowl, available until 25 May, and one from Shakespeare's Globe, available until 31 May. They'll almost certainly be very different interpretations, which would make comparisons interesting, but I don't know if I can fit them both in, especially since it may be a while before I've finished digesting the Cheek by Jowl production I just saw.

In the end, I only went to see two shows at the Pop Up Globe, as the morning performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream was cancelled due to unfriendly weather. It would have been nice to see it, but having now been to two performances in one day I think three might have been overdoing it, and it meant that instead I got to spend a relaxed morning hanging out with relatives.


The mission of the Pop Up Globe is to demonstrate what Shakespeare's theatre looked like not only in the physical surroundings but in the presentation, as popular entertainment in a setting where the audience were clearly visible (and frequently audible) to the actors. This was reflected in the performance of Measure for Measure, which did a lot of broad humour, sight gags, and audience interaction, along with extra lines from time to time in modern vernacular, generally directed at the audience and involving topical gags. (Although some of them served dramatic purposes instead -- the last interpolated line in the play gave Isabella the final word.) Pompey's comic monologue about all the old friends he's met again since he was thrown in prison was completely rewritten to feature names familiar to the current audience. Anachronisms were gaily scattered through the show: the Duke set out for Poland lugging a suitcase on wheels, and when he disguised himself as a friar, it was as an American revivalist preacher (more audience interaction - "Can I get an amen?").

( Four-hundred-year old spoilers )

There were places where I would have liked more seriousness and less buffoonery, but it was appropriately serious in the moments that absolutely had to be, and in general the style of the show worked in the setting. I enjoyed it immensely, and even if it had been the only show I'd seen I would have counted the weekend well spent.


Which, if I haven't phrased it carefully enough, is going to make it sound like I didn't enjoy the performance of Hamlet. I did; it was well enough done, it just didn't wow me the way Measure for Measure did. Hamlet was always going to have to work harder to impress me; unlike Measure for Measure, I've seen a lot of productions of Hamlet already and have strong opinions about it. I also think that as a drama it's a trickier fit for the house style; you can't go all out with the gags and the audience-pumping the way they could with the comedy.

There were still places where they acknowledged the audience, and anachronistic touches. The comic gravedigger was in modern dress and sang "Like a Virgin" instead of the usual Elizabethan ditty. And Polonius, though otherwise dressed in period, had a mobile phone, with a running gag about it always ringing at inopportune moments -- which paid off dramatically when it rang while he was spying on Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia.

As is often the case with such a large collection of characters, many of the supporting actors played multiple roles. One interesting set was that the same actor was Old King Hamlet, the Player King, and Fortinbras. (With an extra note of interest to recall, every time someone talked about how great a ruler Old King Hamlet was, that earlier in the day the same actor had been the unrighteous ruler Antonio in Measure for Measure.)

It was an abridged script, to keep the performance under two-and-a-half hours. The main omission I noticed in the first half was that scene with Polonius and Reynaldo that everybody leaves out, while other scenes were trimmed down (Hamlet's encounter with the ghost, most of his conversations with the players, etc.). I really started noticing the edits after Hamlet is sent to England. We got Fortinbras talking to his captain, so we'd recognise him later, but not the rest of the scene where the captain meets Hamlet and Hamlet does a soliloquy. The account of how Hamlet dealt with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was cut to a bare minimum, or perhaps a bit less than that. (And, to save on characters, instead of having a sailor tell Horatio about it, we got Horatio telling Gertrude, which has implications I'm still thinking about.) The gadfly Osric is left out, replaced with a generic servant.

The duel at the end was very effectively staged, one place where they definitely hit the right note of crowd-pleasing spectacle, and featured what I presume were period-authentic blood effects.


Other notes:
- The stage had at least two trapdoors, a small one with a lift that the ghost used for entrances and exits, and a larger one with a lid that opened outward and steps going down, that acted as a dungeon in Measure for Measure and the open grave in Hamlet.
- There are two companies of actors touring with the theatre, each doing two plays. The two plays I saw were done by the same actors, with each actor having a large part in one play and smaller role(s) in the other: the leads from Measure for Measure appeared, appropriately, as the company of players in Hamlet. The actor playing Hamlet himself was Claudio in Measure for Measure, meaning he got both the speeches about fearing death and what might come after.
- Each company also includes a small group of musicians who accompany the performances on period instruments. Some of the music for Hamlet was very eerie.

1. I did end up signing up for Remix Revival, and assignments are now out, so now I'm at the (presumably traditional) next step of staring in dismay at my assigned recipient's fic and being intimidated by how good it is.


2. At gaming group last week, I played games of Cards Against Humanity (still don't like the actual game at all, but had fun playing it because of who I was playing with), Magic: The Gathering (was tired and rusty, and got squished quickly), and Skull (still not much good at it, still having enormous fun playing regardless).


3. Having failed to get cast in How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse (which has a very small number of roles, and I will happily admit that the people who got them were at least as well suited as me), I am instead working on the lighting and sound. It's the first time I've been lighting designer on a production (as opposed to working under someone else's instruction) and I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.


4. We had the AGM for the brass band recently. For the last year, I've been the vice president of the committee, and found myself fairly well suited to it. This year I've swapped roles with another committee member who had been stuck with the role of secretary for the past few years and not thriving in it; apart from giving her a break I'm interested to see how she does as VP because she's always been one of the committee members who cares about the band having good leadership and not just keeping things rolling comfortably along, and did things about it even when she was just an ordinary committee member.


5. A while back I discovered on Youtube a really neat TV series from the 1980s called Playing Shakespeare. It's presented by John Barton, one of the founders of the Royal Shakespeare Company, accompanied by the actors of the Company, who provide practical demonstrations and share their experiences. That includes a lot of people who went on to become world famous (Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet -- who's a revelation in this to one who only knew him as Poirot) or who will be familiar to people who watch a lot of British TV from the 1970s and 1980s (Sheila Hancock, Mike Gwilym, Donald Sinden) or just had massive stage careers (Peggy Ashcroft drops in for one episode to reprise one of her famous roles). There's an episode on character interpretation that consists almost entirely of actors who have played Shylock discussing and demonstrating their very different approaches (all from productions directed by Barton; one of the points the episode is making is that there's no one correct interpretation). Another episode, on "Passion and Coolness", ends with a performance of Leontes and Hermione's reunion scene in The Winter's Tale, with Patrick Stewart reprising his then-recent and highly regarded performance as Leontes.

(via lost_spook)

1) What was the first Shakespeare play you read or seen performed?

First live performance would have been a local amateur production of Twelfth Night. I can't remember whether that was before or after we did Romeo and Juliet in school, so the first in any format might have been Zeffirelli's R&J that we watched then. Either way, I think R&J was the first one I read.


2) What is your favorite Shakespeare play?

At the moment, As You Like It is my favourite for pure enjoyment, but that's because it's the one I most recently saw a good production of; it'll change again next time I see a good production of one of the others.

Hamlet is the one I find most fascinating, and keep coming back to, partly because I've never seen a version of it I've found entirely satisfactory. Every new production I watch, I see something new that I'd never thought of before, and always, always, I learn a lot from the things that I look at and go, "No, that's obviously wrong." It's the one I most often tell myself I'm going to direct one day, since that's the only way I'll ever see it done Properly. (And presumably, if that day ever comes, somebody will come out of my production muttering about the things I got Obviously Wrong, and so the cycle will continue.)


3) What is your least favorite Shakespeare play?

I'm not fond of his comedies, on the whole; I don't share his opinions on some of the things he finds funny and particularly on some of the things he considers to constitute a happy ending. That said, the amount I actually enjoy any given comedy depends a lot on what the production at hand is doing with it: the first production I saw of As You Like It made it one of my least favourite Shakespeare plays, and then the second made it one of my most favourite. So I'm not going to name a single least favourite play, because it's not necessarily worse than the others, it's just the one where I haven't yet seen that one really good production.


4) Who do you think wrote Shakespeare; are you a Stratfordian or Oxfordian?

Stratfordian, like all right-thinking people, though I admit to a brief flirtation with Oxfordianism when I was a teenager and the idea that Shakespeare might not have been Shakespeare seemed new and interesting.


5) Which Shakespeare plays have you read or seen or seen performed?

I have definitely seen As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night on stage or screen or both.

I can't at the moment recall whether I've actually seen The Tempest or Othello all the way through. (Forbidden Planet presumably doesn't count.)

I own a copy of the Complete Works, but somewhere along the line I picked up an aversion to reading plays on my own time if I haven't seen them first, so if it's not listed above I haven't read it either.

Fiction books
Lionel Bart. Oliver!
Lois McMaster Bujold. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (e)
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener. Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire (e)
T Kingfisher. The Raven and the Reindeer (e)
Tim Powers. On Stranger Tides (e) (re-read)
Manly Wade Wellman. The Beyonders (e)

In progress
Terry Pratchett. Soul Music (e) (re-read)

Non-fiction books in progress
Harley Granville-Barker. Prefaces to Shakespeare: Hamlet

( short, screen, and stage )
( books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
William Shakespeare. Hamlet