Day 45: Witness for the Prosecution, by Agatha Christie

In this play we have a marked shift in where the action takes place. Most of Christie's stories so far have followed a group of people, in varying states of being cut off from the world in which one (or more) of them are killed on stage. This time we start with an accusation and arrest, and the action is split between the courtroom and associated legal offices as the case unfolds. Central to the story are a seemingly innocent man and his apparently compulsively lying wife. There are so many shifts and changes, holes and mismatches that it's almost impossible to see where the blame is going to eventually lie. I don't tend to follow cleverly-delivered lies all that well anyway, but I was left still entirely unsure what the truth of the situation really was by the end. It's possible it may have been clearer in performance.

Day 43: The Mousetrap, by Agatha Christie (day 44 again spent travelling)

I first saw this play with my grandmother many years ago, since it's so long-running (I think at the time it may have been celebrating 45 or 50 years, it's now into the 60th anniversary tour) and while I don't remember much about seeing it then, I certainly enjoyed reading the script. It's interesting that the play shares a name with the play-within-a-play from Hamlet... and a brief look at the introductory notes mentions that in fact Christie named her play in honour of that, as the original title of the radio play (from which the stage show grew) was Three Blind Mice, a title already attributed to a different play.

For the sake of those who haven't seen it, I will take to heart the traditional request (not included in the script, but mentioned in the notes and something I do feel like I might remember from having seen it) that the secret not be given away. It seems entirely reasonable that the longest continuously running show in history should keep a bit of mystery about it. There are plenty of shows and films with various prizes attributed to them, but not many can boast Guinness records, and The Mousetrap has - technically - four (though one of those was essentially a new certificate for longest running production presented at the 50th anniversary gala production).

Of itself there's perhaps not much to say, as with her other plays, Christie has provided varied characters with deep backstories, a meticulously detailed setting and plenty of twists in the tale. Once again, a joy to read (and as it turned out, a pleasant way to spent a dismally rainy afternoon).

Day 42: The Hollow, by Agatha Christie (Day 41 was spent travelling and not much else)

Attempting to get back on track in time for the new year, today's play was The Hollow. More little twists in this one than the previous Christie plays, and a lot of obvious nods to genre clichés before turning them aside and going in a different direction - the victim didn't die instantly, the name he cried out in his death throes wasn't the killer, the butler was accused but didn't do it... and so on. I continue to find her style wonderfully easy to read and follow. Once again there was a huge amount of detail put into describing the set, but the entirety of the action remains in that one place and everything listed is eventually required by at least a couple of lines of dialogue during the course of the story.

Once again, Christie has written in complex and interesting backstories for all of the characters, some of them clearly designed to be red herrings to the mystery. On in particular - an apparently "conviniently timed" proposal turns out to be genuinely meant rather than a handy cover story as the other characters suspect. Yet another cliché twisted.

There are a couple of characters who would appeal to me to play, in particular Midge and Gerda, who seem to have far deeper characters than almost anyone else on stage even notices in them. Playing with those layers is always interesting, and while it's reasonably common to see those deeper motivations shared with the audience but not the other characters, here there's a lot of depth revealed very late on which explains earlier actions, so playing the character would require having that extra layer hidden under the surface all the way through, maybe showing in the way certain lines are said or a meaningful glance, there to see if you know what to look for but not so obvious that the reveal is lost.

Day 40: Thursday/Boxing Day is a day off.

Day off, but not without it's useful moments. I've been talking a lot about what it is I'm doing and why, what I've been reading and generally starting to get a handle on who I am. All that aside, we also had a family game combining elements of Charades, taboo/articulate and just a minute, which was entertaining but also a useful bit of practice in creative communication - round one, you can say anything but the name you're trying to convey, round two you can use one word only, and round three is normal charades, but using the same set of names for each round so there's a memory element as well, which mostly comes into play for more obscure choices which weren't entirely familiar to everyone playing.

Tomorrow should be back to business as usual. Merry Christmas everyone!

Day 38/39 - (Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!) The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare

I'm not sure if it was the distractions of the season or something about the play itself, but I found it hard to follow the story in any detail as I was reading this. I definitely remember "doing" this one in English class at school, but don't recall much of the story from then either. A cursory scan of the notes (Arden Shakespeare edition) point to the play being a retelling, in some parts almost verbatim, of a romance story available in print at the time of writing called Pandosto.

Being so aware as I was reading that I wasn't really following the plot isn't necessarily a bad thing - as with every Shakespeare play I will revisit it later, hopefully at least once on stage, and what bits of the notes I read have me interested in learning more. As for what I did follow, There's a complicated story of a family split apart by jealousy, forbidden love, episodes of "rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated" and an eventual scene of reconciliation where everyone gets their happy ending. The plot skeleton isn't all that far removed from that of Cymbeline when broken down like that, and I've seen multiple references to many of his latter plays having a certain flavour.

I think I'd probably be remiss in writing a review of The Winter's Tale without mentioning that infamous stage direction involving a man rather suddenly (and conveniently, to the plot), being chased down and eaten by a bear. I suspect that the original story might have provided a little more explanation, or at least may have established that the area might be populated by bears. There's also the point that in Shakespeare's time bear baiting was a public spectacle almost as popular as the theatre, at least when he was starting out. There were several venues that actually hosted both, so it's not entirely impossible that they may have been able to get a real bear on stage.

Day 37: Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie

The next installment of holiday murder mysteries, this time on holiday in Jerusalem. This one has similarly detailed set requirements, the more I think about that I suspect it's a hangover from the majority of Christie's work being prose rather than script. There is one character with a written dialect accent, which normally annoys me but it's kept to just a minimum required to remind the reader of the accent, so it doesn't slow things down too much. I do sort of feel like it should be left to the actor rather than written in, in general.

Once again I find myself drawn into interesting character backstories and clever twists. This time we're really not given any pathos for the victim whatsoever - she's a thoroughly awful human being all the way through, and the end is both fitting and horrific. There is the insinuation that most of the surviving characters go on to at least have a chance of living happily ever after, which is a relief. It's very easy to quickly start to care about these characters from the outset, one of the things I think makes a great script.

Day 36: And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie

Over the holiday season, my thus-far traditional Saturdays off are going to be sort of rearranged around family time, and since there were at least 2 days last week without a play it seems entirely fair now that I'm back on track to just keep going.

I've brought along a book of eight of Christie's plays to get me through the majority of the season (though I have A Winter's Tale for Christmas eve) and it seems even more fitting that I should be in Devon while reading them, as it turns out this is where she did the majority of her writing (and indeed, it's where this first one is set). And Then There Were None sets ten people lured to and stranded on Indian Island, each accused of having a hand in someone's death, either directly as murderer or through careless action or inaction. The action played out over the course of several days reminds me very much of the film Clue, with plenty of farce in what would otherwise be a terrifying predicament.

As reading material the style is light and quick - I have seen Mousetrap performed, though quite some time ago now, which is what tempted me to look into Christie's broader repetoire in the first place, and it doesn't disappoint. As a short and comedic murder mystery there's not a lot of take-home moral message but there are certain acting challenges which come to mind. The stage layout is very particularly prescribed and stays largely the same throughout the play - which is something I've complained about in the past but in this case it is necessary and gives a much clearer idea of the grand scale and remote location of the house where the play is set without actually needing to show all of it. Very much looking forward to getting through the rest of these plays over the next couple of weeks!

Day 35: The Herd, by Rory Kinnear

I picked this one up having seen Rory Kinnear in the Hollow Crown adaptation of Richard II and subsequently finding out he'd written a play himself. It's a heartbreaking story pretty much from the outset - as the blurb says, it's about "a family falling apart" with the action taking place around the plans for a birthday party for a severely disabled son we never see onstage.

In terms of writing style there's one thing that stands out as unusual to me, which is the directions written in for lines to be spoken over or interrupting another. These are a little hard to follow while reading but I can certainly see how they'd work rather powerfully on stage (and perhaps more so on screen, where the focus can be more easily directed) to raise the feeling of chaos and friction between the characters. There are a lot of deep emotional scars and history between them, and the text tells enough of the story to find something to relate to in everyone, including the apparent "bad guy", the estranged father. And without giving too much away, the ending feels sort of painfully inevitable from the outset, in the grand tradition of tragedy.

I think it would be fair to say I look forward to more, of the modern plays I've read so far this was one of the best. No written dialect, coherant and devastating storyline, deep characters and an easy super-modern update to a very traditional style of storytelling.

Day 34: In which not much relevant happens.

Today was mostly spent wrapping presents and generally getting ready for the holidays. Normal service resumes tomorrow!

Day 33: Murder in the Cathedral, by T S Eliot

Another of the handful of plays I first came into contact with at school. I was a part of the chorus when we did it, and although the lines were broken up between several groups of us, at one point I ended up learning over half of them to cover for people. Long story, but it meant I pretty much crash-learned the words and didn't get a lot of time to really think about the meaning. The whole thing being rather poetic and being spoken in groups meant really emotive acting sort of wasn't a requirement, though reading the whole thing again now I can see it really should have been.

I find Eliot's writing style very easy to read, and I like the way he plays with the language in his poetry. While I haven't read a lot of his work before, when I was a kid I utterly fell in love with Cats as a musical (I've mentioned it before I think) and in my teens tracked down a copy of Old Possums Book of Practical Cats and was not in the least disappointed. I find it impressive that without resorting to too much archaic phrasing it all still feels believable for the time period it's meant to show. Maybe that's partly because the story thread was picked up in Blackadder, where archaic language tends to get thrown at the fourth wall as a matter of course (not to mention literally beating up Shakespeare) so I find myself drawing certain similarities there. Of course this play came first and was more than likely a large part of the inspiration, but I'd seen the series before I came across the play.

The multiple epilogues - first the knights, then the priests and villagers - certainly do the job of twisting the take-away message. It's somewhat rare to see everyone's motivations and explanations in a single play. It does make the last part of the play a little bit clunky compared to the rest, particularly the knights' stories delivered in prose rather than verse, but that change of pace and tone fits entirely with what they're saying - that really this bishop wanted to die a martyr and pretty much brought it on himself, that as the killers they did it not for pleasure but because they were sent. The various reactions of those who live on in the town tell another story, that he is remembered as a martyr, perhaps because they don't know why or how he came to that end.

Day 32: missed day, this has not been a good start to the week.

Basically, yesterday evening on the way home from a friend's house, I fell over and twisted my ankle badly enough to wind up in A&E until after midnight. I spent the night and most of the day back at said friend's place and took the time to rest up. While at least in theory that shouldn't have made a difference to my ability to read, I found that taking the time to regroup my thoughts was a needed break as well. I'll see how the next few weeks go, but I may need to think about scheduling extra monthly breaks alongside the Saturdays off I already have.

Day 30/31: Love for Love, by William Congreve

I took 2 days over reading this play for various reasons - it has not been a smooth start to the week. There was a post outlining why, but I've decided to remove it - dwelling on things going wrong is unhelpful. So, on with the review.

I do struggle a little bit with Congreve's work, the language isn't quite as familiar as Shakespeare and there are certain turns of phrase which are still in use today but with different meanings, which I find trip me up and slow me down a little bit. From a view of the evolution of language that's interesting, but it requires a little more concentration and thought to understand what's being said.

There's a thread in this story where one of the men tries to convince one of the girls that lies and misdirection (about feelings) should form part of any courtship - exactly the attitude I dislike in stories like The Importance of Being Earnest - again, interesting to see how far back that attitude stretches. That said the women, through most of the play, seem to be rather more intelligent than they're given credit for by their respective suitors and have their own agendas.

I think I may need to come back to this one at a later date. The difficulties I have had with my first readings of each of Congreve's plays so far has meant most of what I take away from those first readings is a sense of frustration and not enough of an impression of the story itself.

Day 29: Boiling a Frog, by Christopher Deans

First produced in 2005 and dealing with friction between the British government, the Scottish local government and the Catholic church, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Politics and organised religion are things I've tended to actively avoid. Aside from not knowing a lot about the context however, I was a little surprised to find myself drawn into the action and intreague. There is some writing in dialect, but only from a couple of the characters, so there's some variety. That actually helps to keep the characters straight in my head while reading, since it makes the change of voice a little more obvious. As usual it'd be different seen on stage, and as to that there's a good balance of directions.

It being a fairly recent piece of writing there is plenty there that is still relevant today - some of it perhaps more so now than when it was written, like the reference to legalising gay marriage, something which has just in the last few months been promised and gone through. There are some direct references to church-related scandals which date the play a little more closely. The main story though, the framing of various politicians through a combination of technology, slander and trickery is one which is pretty daring. I'm not entirely sure how based in fact any of the proceedings of the story are - it's an adaptation of a novel so I would assume not much, but the use of real and recognisable names for at least some of the references (Salmond is named at one point, in passing) makes me wonder if at least some of the story is based on real events.

The way all the elements of the story come together - several lines of somewhat convoluted action leading to a final big reveal, murders, relationship issues, the layout reminds me a little bit of a modernised Shakespeare play. The variety of voice adds to the effect. It's certainly not poetry, nor a timeless story, so I'm not drawing a complete parallel, but I stand by the observation.

Day 28: Saturday is Skills day AND Bio Questions for December

I've started looking into choosing a monologue from Cymbeline as Imogen. Technically I'm a couple of years older than the listed playing age as it appears pretty much anywhere I can find, but I really don't look it so I feel that's a risk worth taking. Other than that, it's the usual fare of cast interviews, audition tips and guitar practice.

I'm not doing a seperate post for my bio questions this month. These all come from my friend Lauren - if any of my other readers want to suggest 3-4 questions for January (and beyond) stick them in a comment.

So we're one month in already. How's it all going? Obviously we have the blog here, but how are you managing the work behind the blog?

4 weeks today, in fact. It's already been a bit hilly emotionally. There's been some late nights, some tears of frustration and a lot of beating myself up. I've got a lot of gremlins in here - I spent five years running away from everything I knew and loved and that included theatre. Coming back now means dealing with a lot of things I locked away, not just from those last few years before I left Bath, but from much earlier. I'm starting to learn to listen to the good memories, but to know which ones to ignore and grow out of, they still need to be heard first. And some of the good things are a long way back, as far as primary school in some cases.

If you woke up tomorrow through the other side of drama school, what would you want to do first?

Have a big celebration with family and friends. All those people who I can trust to tell me when I look tired, remind me to eat, listen to an hour of crying down the phone and still be relied on to fill those premiere seats! My acting (as with my general emotional coping strategy) has always been a pretty internal and personal thing. I often did school plays against the better judgement of teachers interested in keeping up my grades or having any semblance of a sleep pattern for production week. At university my incredible and long-suffering personal tutor somehow got an honours degree out of me in spite of spending most of my time outside of lectures involved in any production I could get my hands on even if it was just painting set for a one-man show. I know how easily I get carried away, and how much I end up being inside my own head and talking about very little else. So surrounding myself with those people who will catch me and give me lots of tea on the bad days, but also talk me out of the rut and throw me back into the fight once I'm on my feet again is important.

How would you hate to be described (primarily as an actor, but you know)?

Let's give those gremlins a voice then. I'd hate to have my body shape entirely overshadow my acting ability, expressions, voice and everything else. I know it probably will be commented on, but I'd like to think that 5 years from now if I end up on a big screen it will be in a role where that shape is either entirely irrelevant, or is deliberate and isn't seen as horrible. I'd equally hate to be dismissed as only doing this to prove a point. Obviously I'd love to see a break in the trend of super-skinny celebrities, but I wouldn't want to be labelled as only that. And finally, I think pretty much every actor would say they wouldn't want to be described as terrible. I'll take criticism, and I believe that in all walks of life, it'd be a boring world if we all liked the same things, but I know how it feels to have your best work dismissed out of hand and it hurts enough when it comes quietly from a teacher who doesn't like you. It's another thing entirely when it's public.

Why does pizza come in a square box?

Ah the inevitable bonus question! Because the square boxes are easier to make and cause less production-end waste than a more complex box would. Inside that box there could be a plain margharita, stuffed crust, garlic bread, piles of veggies or just a handful of pepperoni, it might be spicy, or made with barbecue sauce instead of marinara. The box might give you some clue of what's inside, tell you where it was made (or, if it's like the ones we had the other day which inspired this question, come with an interactive image on the front that comes to life in front of a camera...) but you're not really going to know what's inside until you open the box. Pizza-based philosophy, boys & girls, you saw it here first. Or something. Next question?

..Oh, no more questions. Right then. Comments and feedback, potential bio questions, observations on plays or adaptations I've covered that you've seen or read yourself... these are all welcome! This is a learning process and as I mentioned just now, I know I can get very much into my own head when I'm working with anything related to theatre and the more I can bring that out, discuss ideas with other people, the more successful I think the year ahead will be.

Day 27: The Double Dealer, by William Congreve

The notes for this play mention that Congreve was basically arrested for lewdness after this play, and I have to agree it's deserved. The sheer amount of debauchery, affairs, and backhandedness is ridiculous. The cast includes one character who is presumably the titular Double Dealer and it's never entirely made clear what he's actually trying to achieve other than making life for his supposed best friend (who is a total doormat) utter misery to the point he stands to lose a lover, a reputation and an inheritance all in one go. Thankfully he does get found out and hauled off in the end, but only after laughing in the face of pretty much every other character in the entire story.

I csn certainly see this being a fun play to perform, and it's probably a lot easier to follow the various intricate relationships between the characters when seen on stage. I think I've mentioned before that I sometimes struggle with complex social structures in literature. In this case I felt that I ended up following what I felt was the main storyline and probably missed some nuances of the other characters and how they fit into the weave.

The sex themes are really not subtle. There are some wonderful turns of phrase though... "..a man can't drink without quenching his thirst.." bemoaning the situation of wanting to see two women over the course of the evening... and yes, the entire play stays at that level. There isn't a single scene which doesn't contain at least one drunk person and/or at least one person trying to get into someone else's pants.

So all in all, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As a follow-up to yesterday's Importance of Being Earnest it's certainly more interesting and complicated, though the characters are not much more likeable they are certainly a little bit more three-dimensional. And of course the whole thing is infinitely more raunchy, though that's likely as much to do with the period setting and time of writing as it is with the storyline. Once again (as with the last Congreve play I covered) there are threads of story and character types which are recognisable from Shakespeare, but with far less subtlety.

Day 26: The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde

This is a play I will admit to knowing, but having no love for. There's something about the era, and general attitude that just annoys me about almost all the characters involved. There's not really much commentary I can give as to why - there's a minimum of stage direction set into the script, a fairly strong sense of backstory and reasons for each of the characters to be as annoying as they are. Most of the plays I've covered so far have inspired wandering thoughts and reflections - pretty much the only thing this set me to thinking about was performances of the play itself, in particular one my friends were in at university. I'm not sure if I'm missing a broader point, but the story does seem to be mostly fairly shallow and lacking in any real message. I'm not the type who really gets the point of smalltalk though, so this one was probably always going to be lost on me. There are some good lines, and certainly opportunities for slightly over-the-top character acting. It is just otherwise mostly an hour or so of setting up a rather bad pun of a punchline. I almost want to apologise for not getting it, not liking it, and not finding more to say about it.

Day 25: no play... but lots of information! (In Search of Shakespeare, and The Adventure of English)

Today for various reasons I failed to do any reading. However, I did find a few documentaries - one set was a series about the life of Shakespeare and the other a series about the development of the English language.

Firstly, I need to correct myself on some earlier comments. I talked about how I'd heard that Shakespeare was writing plays voicing concerns about succession and thought maybe that the "wayward heir" character he seems to often return to might have been in itself sending up a certain potential heir. Now that I've had a bit of a refresher course in English history that's probably not the case, since Queen Elizabeth didn't actually HAVE any direct heirs and the crown passed to a once or twice removed cousin when she died.

There's a really interesting story that the Earl of Essex in 1601 decided to try to lead a revolt, and to get the message out to the general populus of London persueded (through bribery, apparently) Shakespeare's troupe to perform Richard II including the deposition scene which until then had never been published or played thanks to the censors. As it turned out the revolt failed to take hold and the conspirators were caught and tried for treason... and in general the actors were let off after explaining they'd been paid rather a lot to do it. It's a pretty powerful anecdote of how much you can get away with on stage.

Shakespeare also seems to have had a bit of a double life as he had to keep his family religion largely secret, something which links many of his friends, sponsors and advocates through most of his career. His intelligence as an actor as well as a writer shows through in his survival through a huge range of atmospheres, from changes in national religion, through wars, cultural highs and lows, plague and the Great Fire, and an uneasy succession. I get the distinct feeling I'd oversimplified the time he lived through in my mind. Partly I didn't have a concrete idea of the time his career spanned, and I think when I last really looked at these things, in my early teens and uninspired by my teacher, I didn't really have a personal experience of how much a world can change in 30 years. I was 19 and packing to go to university in the week of the attacks of 9/11. I really didn't understand the events that had led up to that point, but I remember writing at the time that I knew history was being made.

I'll draw in something from The Adventure of English here - that several times throughout our history various people have made the assertion that getting everyone speaking the same language will bring peace, whether that's referred to homogenising the language across England, or teaching colonists, or natives. I think it's true that a common language allows for better communication, so we can ask questions first and shoot later. However, it does also mean we're more immediately understood in insults and differences. While there might be a lot of English speakers in the world, we're all still followers of a huge variety of religions, with a variety of allegiances and histories. To coin an ironic phrase, the cliché of the English hating the French becomes a little more understandable when you realise that they spent a lot of the 300 years or so of being rulers over here trying to abolish the English language.

Day 24: Richard II, by William Shakespeare (BBC Hollow Crown adaptation)

The first time watching this one, I really didn't get it. Now with a few more viewings (including the subtitles for today's attempt) I have a better feel for the play. My first observation is a rather petty one - Richard being dressed in a nearly skin-toned suit for most of the film was a little bit off-putting. That said though, it does add to the uneasiness about the character in general, certainly by the end everyone around him seems to be sick of the melodramatics. It's difficult to feel any sympathy for him - he seems determined to give up and flake out of almost every situation he finds himself, including apparently (if the script is taken at face value) deciding he's been deposed at the first sign that his decisions have been challenged. It's a fair conclusion to draw, as it turns out, but technically Bollingbroke only asked for his lands back, not the crown - that was offered in a rather defeatist act that Richard keeps up for the rest of the play. I get the feeling maybe he didn't really want to be king in the first place, it just sort of happened that way.

Interestingly, when Bollingbroke gets banished, Richard says of him that he basically tips his hat to everyone no matter how low-class, and seems to imply that he himself wouldn't do such a thing. Later in Henry IV part i, the King Bollingbroke is to become pretty much says the same thing about Richard, and claims to have kept himself rarely seen and shrouded in mystery. I may be picking on a tiny thing here, but I can't help but feel there's a rather large chapter missing in the middle.

Once again I find myself wondering how much I really missed at school with my developing blind spot for History and English. When I was in primary school I loved to read, got stuck into every project we were given and usually chose ancient civilisations whether or not the subject matter was limited to historical themes, developed an interest in other languages that stuck with me all the way through to A-levels and already had a blossoming interest in not only Shakespeare but Chaucer. I won a school prize at the end of primary school for general improvement and was allowed to choose a book as a prize - that year we'd been introduced to the Canterbury Tales and I asked for a copy, which came in the form of a beautifully illustrated modern translation. The deeper I get into rediscovering Shakespeare, as well as discovering the wealth of modern work out there, it's a little bit like stepping back a lot further than I realised I needed to go to find that I didn't always shy away from all this. It's overgrown and sleeping, but there was at one point a real spark for everything I'm working to reclaim.

Day 23: The Road to Mandalay, by John McGrath.

This is a musical written for schools in 2000, in response to a challenge by a group of headteachers to write a play for all of their schools to perform. The play came out of a series of workshops with the students, discussions with teachers and presumably a lot of research. The author states in an introduction that he encouraged the actors to research the history behind the roles they were playing. The script I have doesn't include the tunes to most of the songs (though one or two are indicated to be sung to existing tunes) but is otherwise complete including some very particular staging notes. Usually that's something I've not shied from complaining about, but in this case it was clearly part of a project designed to run as similarly as possible in each school that performed it (13 of the original 17 schools who approached him with the challenge initially).

The play centres around a meeting of the United Nations first drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, observed by a cynical and disenchanted group of modern-day children who pretty much rip apart every article to show how nearly every single one is still being violated today. It's a powerful lesson in modern world history post-WW2, which is certainly interesting for me. It's not something I was ever taught in school, and if I hadn't done GCSE History I'd never have got past WW1. I was very much of the opinion as a kid that I didn't need to know what was going on around me... we didn't have much in the way of Current Affairs classes and History lessons were mostly about wars, or ancient empires.

The style is clear and informative without being condescending. I know I learned a few things from reading, and it certainly has a place in any History, English or PSHE classroom. There's a scene switching between private and state school classrooms and both are exaggerated just enough not to entirely alienate the other, but just subtlely enough not to offend. Overall it's fun, engaging and educational, with a few twists of irony for the older and/or brighter kids (and the parents) and a little bit of suggested multimedia involvement to really bring the whole thing up to date. I'd have to say I'm impressed.

Day 22: Glengarry Glen Ross, by David Mamet

I had a feeling I might recognise the title somehow when I picked this up at the library, but mostly it was just one more Methuen series modern play to add to the collection. The all-male cast and dedication to Harold Pinter had me a little on my guard (and I was already having a bit of a wrong-side-of-the-bed day before I started reading) so it's possible that this deserves coming back to if I get the opportunity to see it performed - after all, it started at the National Theatre and hit Broadway for a while so clearly enough people in the world didn't think it was terrible... but I found it painful to read.

The writing style left me begging for a completed thought, or even a full sentence. It reads like the unedited transcript of a heated argument all the way through and while there's something to be said for sounding natural, the reason that style of speech works when you're actually arguing with someone is that both of you already know at least part of what's going on. Here no inflection, not even non-verbal interjections are left up to the directors or the actors, it's all right there in the script. In one run-on line, there are 3 different "lemme finish" type phrases chopped in to indicate that the other person in the scene is meant to be trying to interrupt. The entire script is full of italics, elipses and cut-off words and phrases. I had to go back and re-read the first two or three pages because I couldn't tell whether the first speaker was adressing the other guy on stage, or talking into a phone.

Ok, I'll take a breath here. It's not only the writing style that annoyed me. The entire story line seems to be a bunch of guys complaining that work sucks, and then one breaks in and sacks the office because the manager is the main cause of the suckiness. This solves exactly nothing and everyone still goes home angry. Great. So, what was the point?

I'll accept I may be missing something. I don't have a lot of experience in the sort of job these men have (though, I did do a week of cold sales pitching several years ago and yes, it is soul destroying - but mostly that drove me to go and do pretty much anything else and talk about anything else, when I was on my own time) and not being male myself, maybe I don't "get" the vast quantities of testosterone that seems to make up the bulk of Act 2. I know I get very uncomfortable listening to heated arguments and that may have also been part of what's so awkward for me about most of this play.

I knew starting out with this project that there would be some plays that were harder to get into than others. I know I'm a sucker for Shakespeare and particularly the language that goes with it - rediscovering a love of wordplay has been one of the best parts of this so far. I've pretty much universally struggled a little bit with anything that is written in dialect or very stylistically for certain speech patterns. If anything today's play cemented that thought. I feel pretty strongly that part of the joy of acting is taking the words on the page and bringing them to life, and that's a lot harder to do when every inflection and pause is written in for you. On the one hand it might look like dumbing-down the process, possibly making it easier to capture what the author was trying to say and taking the guesswork out of it. For me though, that takes away the creativity. It defines the character so much more narrowly and doesn't really leave room for the actor to find out who his character is on his own terms. This is partly my own instinct and partly what I feel strongly that I agree with from a number of interviews and such seen online. I had a similar reaction on an earlier review regarding an overly-directed script. I am pretty sure I'll come back to this line of thought again sometime, but I think that's enough for today.

Day 21: Saturday is Skills Day!

Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a day off, at least today. I think I needed to recharge though. This week has been a bit of a rollercoaster where the huge burst of energy I had at the start of the project has started to flag a little bit, and I've worked through that. I've had a few moments of doubt, but having a live theatre trip helped me refocus, I found a Shakespeare play featuring a promenant female role I liked, and I've started to really feel like I'm exorsising the worst of my memories from school. That is a work in progress, but there is progress.

There's a long way to go yet, and there's a few things I'm hoping to put into place in the new year - I'm just waiting on an email or two.

Day 20: Henry IV, part ii, by William Shakespeare (BBC Hollow Crown adaptation)

Wrapping up the week where it started, with part two of Henry IV. As a play, the second installment feels rather more disjointed than the first, in particular Falstaff's thread of the story seems to get a lot of airtime when it's clear from the start Hal is already distancing himself from him. That does set up the final scene to be all the more heartbreaking, which is presumably the point. Prince John being given some very public authority seems to pass almost entirely unremarked by anyone involved - though in the interviews it's been hinted that some lines were cut in the name of timing for these adaptations and I wonder if that particular battlefield scene is explained any more deeply in the complete text. I certainly intend to come back and read these plays later in the year.

After yesterday's revalation of Imogen as a female role I can relate to, and now watching this, I realise I've been unfair in my assessment. The histories (particularly those covered by the Hollow Crown series) are of necessity "manly" plays, dealing with succession and war and suitably dutiful women (and occasional whores). In the same way, the romantic comedy plays are stories specifically about falling in and out of love and the female roles are mostly going to be primarily written for someone else to spurn, fall for or whatever. Anything we see of those women is probably going to be related to those storylines (though, I still maintain he's inherantly distrusting of women and is convinced we're all plotting to kill at least one person at any given time).

The deeper into this project I get, the more I wonder at how much I hated English classes at school. I'm finding myself totally drawn in to the language, remembering experiences, and seeing the world a little differently every day. And maybe that's why - most of the voices in Shakespeare are adults, with the experience of all those deep and complicated feelings like grief, pride, duty, honour - of which, when I was a kid, I had no real understanding. Even romantic love was something I didn't really experience myself until my mid teens. (That last was one of the many sticking points with the much-maligned English Teacher - she seemed to think everything in literature pretty much ever written was about sex - something that made me very uncomfortable when it was discussed in class when I was 12). And it's not just Shakespeare - pretty much every play draws on that experience and emotional maturity that can only really be understood by someone who's at least peripherally experienced something similar. Next week there will be one or two plays apparently written for children, and I'm interested now to see how that lack of emotional language and understanding is adressed.

Day 19: Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare.

As the one apparently often cited as the most overlooked for forgotten of Shakespeare's works, this was high on my list of plays to come to early in the year. I really enjoyed the story, and it's a refreshing change to have a happy ending and comparatively few deaths (though as I've half-joked about before, they are of course by duel and suicide respectively). The sudden divine cameo was a bit of a surprise, and thanks to my affinity for nerdy films I can only imagine Jupiter being played by Patrick Stewart or Anthony Hopkins (probably actually in the Odin costume).

I also find myself needing to re-evaluate my theory that Shakespeare doesn't write women I like. Imogen seems to very much know what she wants, and is willing to go to any length to get it. This is, as usual, in persuit of a man - and that has been part of my complaint, that Shakespeare's women tend to only be defined in relation to their suitors - but in this case she is also for most of the play in that misbehaving-heir position. The difference is in this case, brothers thought lost or dead are revealed right at the end thus freeing her up to go back to the man she loves and not be bound to the throne, something which would be almost impossible to explore as a storyline for a male counterpart. Imogen has some wonderful lines (and plenty of chunky speeches) making this a good play to earmark for further study and possible monologue selection.

A brief online search showed up a film adaptation due out in the new year sometime with Cymbeline (apparently in the original text/language) set as a gangland thriller. Not my usual fare in cinema (and I remember really disliking Romeo + Juliet taken in a similar vein) but I will probably see it once purely for being a Shakespeare adaptation. I'm not entirely convinced by hyper-modern settings of Shakespeare's plays when the language isn't accordingly updated. There is a happy medium - the sort of timelessly-modern setting such as Tennant's Hamlet (reviewed in an earlier post here) seems to work without the need for guns and car chases. Perhaps the deeply interwoven threads of story and layers of deception and revenge present in this one will stand up to the treatment better than Romeo + Juliet did. I can but hope.

Day 18: Ciara, by David Harrower (at the Traverse Theatre)

Decided to take myself to the theatre tonight - the Traverse is Edinburgh's home for new writing, particularly work with local flavour. Wound up nattering to an aspiring writer before and after the show, which was unexpected and cool. The venue itself is small, highly raked and I had a real sense of the experimental vibe of the whole place.

Ciara is a single-act, single-performer show a little over an hour and a quarter long in which we gradually hear the story unfold as to how the title character (also the narrator) came to be sitting in a derilect warehouse on the outskirts of Glasgow in a party dress. Blythe Duff does a spectactular job. There's a huge amount of emotion in the telling of the story and I was laughing, gasping, tooth-sucking... right along with the rest of the small but clearly engaged audience. I should also nod to the tech guys at this point, as the strategic minimalist lighting and occasional incidental music really enhanced an already fantastic performance.

I certainly plan to get hold of the script to add to my collection, not least to go through it for suitable-length segments of monologue. The story ranges through diversions and digressions along with the main thread of the story, touching on sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, murder, family, love, art, extravagance, arson, betrayal, children (and lack of them) and eventual redemption. I have a lot of respect for anyone tackling over an hour's worth of script on their own, but far more so for just how believable and emotive it was - really like being told the story over drinks or something. And the venue lends itself to that - each of us were talked to directly at some point I think, especially those of us down front where we could probably be at least partly seen from stage.

My thoughts on this are somewhat scattered, mostly summed up by my inability to think or say anything but "wow" for a few seconds after the lights came up. I can say with certainty I'm looking forward to revisiting the script later.

Day 17: The Old Bachelor, by William Congreve

There are a lot of characters with interweaving stories in this play, and keeping track of them all with a first cold reading is tricky. I'm pretty sure I missed a lot of the plot points. That said, while I may not have followed the story much further than to think it's based around similar romantic comedy threads to Much Ado About Nothing, the language I find fascinating. A bit of internet research shows this as written at a time half a century or so after Shakespeare, and while there are similarities, there is also the beginnings of evolution towards more modern speech and slang. It feels deliberately written in that style as well. I've noticed in the process of re-acquainting myself with Shakespeare that there really are several voices - the traditional image of flowery and obviously outdated language tends to be spoken by characters surrounding the court, or wealthy suitors, that sort of thing. I think I've touched on this before, particularly with Henry IV. Going briefly back to the adaptation I covered the other day, it's interesting to me how much more natural and modern Shakespeare's language sounds in a rough Yorkshire accent. It occurred to me that's probably because the dialect as it stands today seems not to have changed very much. Growing up in London, the language has changed significantly just year to year - slang and vernacular have noticably changed just in the decade or so since I left school. With a melting pot of multiple countries, religions, cultures and a huge variation in level of eduaction it's not really a surprise that things shift and change faster. Returning to today's work, Congreve seems to have been writing very much after the style of Shakespeare, but with a bit of a "modern" (for the time) twist. The prologue and epilogue both have written-in digressions and "forgetfulness" and very much play on this being Congreve's first playscript. It will be interesting to go ahead with the rest of the plays in this collection (I have been reading from The Way of the World and other plays) to see how he develops as a playwrite. As I noted at the start, this one feels quite crowded and complex with characters just from reading. Of course, as with any play, they aren't really designed to be read other than by the actors. I'll certainly be looking out for opportunities to see some of his work performed, if I can.

Day 16: Ciphers, by Dawn King

I bought the book of this and then discovered I'd actually missed my chance to see it in Edinburgh on it's debut tour by a matter of days, and the blurb on the back actually refers to the end of the tour next year in the past tense, which amused me. Random trivia.

The scenes of the play are in a somewhat jumbled order as it follows the story from two different perspectives - the two sisters (to be played by the same actress - all the parts are doubled up). The story is an interesting one, and who actually kills Justine really isn't all that surprising, though there's certainly a couple of plausible endings. I'm not entirely sure what the point was in making the main story line a complete red-herring that basically never gets resolved, but perhaps I'm missing something. That said the dialogue is all well-written and I think I'd enjoy doing this as a performance piece since there's a lot of scope for a range of emotional acting (expecially playing 2 roles throughout).

The characters seem to revolve around the idea of pubicity, secrecy and image. The finality of Justine's death leading to news reports not only exposing her affair but also her life as a spy seems totally believable in the context of the play, but I find myself thinking in a somewhat outdated way that surely her employers would do everything in their power not to reveal that. It's something that's come up in various interviews with different actors I've been watching lately though, that everything really is in the public eye. Just about anyone can be looked up online and it almost doesn't matter how many personas you have, one will eventually link to another and the whole house of cards falls over. As in the play, it only takes one person recognising you and snapping a photo. In that light, it's a wonder how covert espionage is even possible any more.

Day 15: Henry IV, part i, by William Shakespeare (BBC Hollow Crown adaptation)

This is technically not a first viewing... in fact, it's the one that got me to start thinking about getting back into drama again. While in recovery from surgery, I came across the Hollow Crown series and I'll admit, approached them with mixed feelings. There's a lot of names I know and love in the cast of all 4 of these films, but I had never read or seen any of the plays before and had actively avoided engaging with any of the histories as a kid. I think that was mostly to do with not really liking History as a subject (I didn't like English as a subject much either but that was more to do with a teacher I've mentioned before, and my love of the theatre and performing pretty much got me through that).

What I found, as a first taste of these plays (I think I'd seen some clips of the more famous Henry V speeches and such, but not the whole thing) was nothing short of captivating. I can't really compare the adaptations to anything else, but from what I've found with various interviews and reviews I've watched over the last few weeks (and some of them again today) it seems that my impression of the reputation of those plays when I was at school and avoiding them for it still exists... or at least did until these films were made.

So, leaving aside the general comments about the series, I'll turn to the specifics of this play. I've talked about the "wayward son" character before and this is pretty much the showcase for that. Prince Hal does a lot of growing up through the course of this play, but it's actually pretty early that the first inkling that he plans to change his ways eventually shows itself - in this version it's a voiceover but he's talking about having fun and playing while he can knowing that the change will be noticed, and suggesting that being royal when the time comes will be all the more celebrated when his youth is there to compare to. Naturally that's precisely the opposite to what his father thinks as we later find out in a spectacular fight between two very talented actors. But they reconcile their differences over the idea of going to war against Hotspur and those first hints that Hal's starting to leave his old life behind creep into the way he talks to Fallstaff before, during and after the fight. We also get a glimpse of the old King's failing health which sets up part two.

As far as female roles go, there's not many long speeches and probably the most likable woman is Quickly. I'm not really old enough to play her, but the performance here is some of the most naturally spoken (female) Shakespeare I've heard. Again, the allstar casting here helps immensely, but it's also the fact that when the lines come from a character who isn't meant to be courtly, or lovesick or otherwise waxing poetic, I think they tend to read as easier to speak naturally. That's true in any case though, not just Shakespeare... it's just a bit more obvious when the whole thing is in older language than it would be in a modern play. Watching politicians or similar today they still use a lot of long-winded addresses and titles and forms which you wouldn't use among friends in a pub...and Shakespeare doesn't really populate his taverns with many women.

Day 14: Saturday is Skills Day!

It'd be easy enough to call going to see Thor: The Dark World for the second time a bit of a cop-out as far as skills go, but as it was a second viewing I found myself actually really watching certain things more closely, and have a few observations.

First is just a small thing, but the final scene with Anthony Hopkins being Loki in disguise was actually epic beyond all reason and has given me even more respect for him as an actor, which I didn't think possible. Just little things - an eyebrow quirk, an intonation... playing someone else who is playing you is a tricky thing (which we don't often get to see in cinema) and he pulls it off beautifully so that it's not entirely obvious if you don't know to look for it, but when you DO look for it there's a wealth of little bits and pieces to find. Spectacular.

The more general observation I have is about the state of cinema in general - it's getting more epic. I don't mean that in the popular slang sense of being awesome, though it is that as well, but long series such as LOTR/Hobbit, Harry Potter, and the Marvel franchise are raising the bar every time, and it's getting to be unusual to see a film that doesn't have at least 2 live units and half the credits given to the animation and special effects department. That's not a bad thing - it all looks better on the big screen and is probably what's keeping cinema alive at the moment. It also works out well for the actors, since those big epic movies need big casts, and the story arcs spanning several films means more repeat roles.