Romeo and Juliet

I saw Greenstage's outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet last Thursday. Greenstage is one of the truer outdoor theatre companies, having no set or microphones, and I think they always use the advantages of the outdoors well. They also use the audience well, often coming on stage through the audience. You'll suddenly hear someone speaking behind you, and turn around and there will be Romeo. Plus, I was sitting in the very front row (as, knowing the stage manager, we knew the front row was actually several feet in front of where people had started sitting), and when Benvolio was telling Romeo to "examine other beauties" to forget Rosaline, I got to be the beauty they were examining.

It was a good production. They had a bunch of big greyish cloaks, which were used to great effect. For example, people in cloaks kneeling in a semicircle made Juliet's balcony, and people in cloaks managed to block the audience's view enough to get a dead Juliet off stage invisibly. I particularly liked the actors playing Romeo (who was Orsino in the Twelfth Night I saw two years ago), Juliet (Ophelia in my favourite Hamlet), Benvolio, Nurse, and Friar Laurence. I thought Lady Montague was very strange, rather melodramatic, and badly costumed, though I don't know how much of that is her fault.

The story of Romeo and Juliet has never quite managed to win me over. They're so young, and if it were modern times their romance would be of the brief high school variety. If Juliet is to marry Romeo she has to give up her family, who she loves, for this guy in a mask she met at a party who winds up killing her favourite cousin. But everybody always seems to talk about this as one of the greatest romances ever. This production, however, seemed to treat Romeo and Juliet's relationship in what I think is a much more realistic way. They showed Juliet doubting more than I'm used to seeing, and her monologue about the husband who killed her cousin vs. the cousin who would have killed her husband was well-played. Once Romeo leaves for Mantua, there was obvious conflict between Juliet's duty to her husband (despite him being a husband she hardly knows) and her duty to her parents. Maybe my memory of this part of the play is just vague, but I do think not all productions emphasize it so much. It's easy to fall before the idea of Romeo and Juliet as a simple romance, but Greenstage didn't, and they made me like the play better because of this.

Can I just say, if you're going to have all the actors running around in leggings, have them be serious opaque leggings, and not semi-transparent tights, please. It was distracting.

The show is playing through August in parks around Seattle, and I totally recommend seeing it. Maybe by the time you do they'll have got less see-through tights!

Much Ado About Nothing (well, about some plays)

I saw four plays last weekend. One student show at the Bathhouse (Seattle Public Theatre), Fuddy Meers, which was very funny and surreal. As noted earlier, last weekend was the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, which I went to on Sunday. I made it to three plays (despite having intentions of seeing way more)--Greetings from Styx, An Inconvenient Squirrel, and Much Ado About Nothing.

Greetings from Styx was a collection of short plays adapted from Ovid's Metamorphoses, produced by Balagan Theatre. It was quite funny and clever. An Inconvenient Squirrel, by Theater Schmeater, was rather a children's or family play, but Theater Schmeater always does a good job of adding some jokes just for the adults. It was kind of pointedly moralistic (about being who you are), but cute all the same.
I was thoroughly looking forward to Wooden O's Much Ado About Nothing. It's a play I've read, and seen a film adaptation of, but never seen on stage, and it's one of my favourites. I liked the costumes, which I thought looked sort of 1910s, especially the soldiers' uniforms. They were very monochrome, all the men in white and khaki, all the women in white, but somehow that worked extremely well. I think it made all the actors stand out well against all the green of outdoor theatre. The set was lovely, especially given travelling outdoor theatre. I was pleased with nearly all the casting--none of the women too whiny or screechy, none of the men too exaggerated. I was surprised to find Beatrice and Benedick's storyline played mostly on the sides as comic relief. I think of them as the main romance (probably because theirs is one of my favourite romantic plots), though I suppose they're not the characters directly involved in the main plot. The actors playing them, though, actually are married, which is a bit funny. Benedick especially was played as a comic character. The whole thing was very much comic, actually. The audience laughed at sections I always considered rather serious, like Beatrice's "if I were a man" monologue. It was really a great audience, clapping between scenes a lot. I was certainly not disappointed with my first Much Ado, even if parts of it were not as I expected.

Next weekend, hopefully, I'm going to see As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet.

The travelling theatre comes to town

This weekend, July 10th and 11th, is the annual Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, at Volunteer Park. There are 11 different plays, including Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, and several others. I've been to this the last two years, and it is always fun, festive, and Shakespearean. I'm actually visible in the audience in that little photo on the website, which is from Hamlet two years ago. I absolutely loved that Hamlet, and saw it three times, so I'm hoping I'll find another play to fall in love with this year. It's quite exciting plotting out which plays I'll see!

Shakespeare again

I've just finished Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare, which I only started Tuesday morning and didn't read at all yesterday. It's been lovely to spend most of the afternoon and evening just reading.

I read Bill Bryson's book The Mother Tongue last summer, and found it vastly entertaining. Shakespeare is similarly entertaining and full of facts I feel compelled to relate to people. For example, considering this astounding statistic: in the year of William Shakespeare's birth (1564), the infant mortality rate was at nearly two-thirds. We're lucky Shakespeare wasn't one of them.

The main theme of the book is to keep it relentlessly factual. Bryson constantly points out how little evidence there is related to Shakespeare, and uses the length of the book as illustration to this--he is only able to fill 196 pages. And that's with relating the various myths and conjecture about Shakespeare's life, and then showing how unprovable they are. The book also spends time relating circumstances of Shakespeare's England, all of which adds greatly to appreciation of Shakespeare's life and achievements. There is a chapter devoted to discussion of the "real" Shakespeare, and the history behind the odd but persistent assertion that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays.

So if you feel you ought to know more about Shakespeare, this is an excellent book to read, as it is short, interesting, and usefully skeptical.

ShakespeaRe-told

Had an unexpected day of Shakespeare yesterday. I had a DVD of the BBC miniseries Shakespeare Retold floating around, so over lunch I figured I'd sit down and watch it. There are four stories on two discs--Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Predictably, they all have hordes of very recognizable, very good British actors in them. I watched Much Ado About Nothing, because it was the only one of the four I'd never read or seen.

These really are adaptations--they use the story, not the language. Much Ado is set in a fictional local television studio. Beatrice and Benedick are rival news broadcasters. Sarah Parish and Damian Lewis play the pair. I found Sarah Parish extremely familiar, and I know what movies I've seen that she was in, but I don't actually remember her in those movies with any clarity at all, so I don't know why she's so familiar. Damian Lewis, of course, memorable as Soames in The Forsyte Saga. Billie Piper, of Dr Who fame, plays Hero, and everybody else is familiar as well. This was a lovely, lovely adaptation. I couldn't believe I'd never encountered Much Ado before, as it's completely my kind of romantic comedy. And all the actors were perfect in their roles. The tv studio setting worked very well to bring the cast together believably, and it was perfect for people overhearing each other, which is crucial to the story, as microphones and headsets could be left on "accidentally." Anyway, I loved the whole thing.

Later in the day I sat down and read the play. Seemed like the thing to do. It strikes me as rather a simpler story than some of the comedies (Twelfth Night springs to mind as the obvious Comedy With Issues). Much Ado is more black and white, with a clear villain and nothing left particularly unresolved at the end. I'd love to see it performed. I also noticed that Jane Austen borrowed the sentiment in Emma that "if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more" from Claudio in Much Ado. He says, "Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much."

I watched Taming of the Shrew, too. I was less impressed with it, but then that play has some unavoidable issues anyway. It did, though, make it much more palatable to a 21st century woman than the original play is. It's not just Kate that must be tamed, it's Petruchio, too. Kate is an MP, played by Shirley Henderson (familiar from all sorts of movies and tv, though I always sort of think of her as Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter). She's completely terrifying, actually. I never thought of Kate as a shrew in quite that way. She screams at everybody, flips over a table in a restaurant, and generally goes around in a rage. Petruchio played by Rufus Sewell, which I thought was a good choice. Ultimately the whole thing was kind of ridiculous--Petruchio shows up to their wedding in heels, a skirt, and eyeliner, and Kate spends a lot of time running around in her gorgeous wedding dress, getting it really dirty. But it was fun, which I guess is sometimes just the way you have to go with Shakespeare.

Now I'll have to find time to watch the other two stories. Macbeth not my favourite, but it's got Keeley Hawes and Richard Armitage in it, so I'll watch it anyway.

Friday Ephemera #23

So, I know it's not still Twelfth Night, but I was looking for this week's image when it was, so it was on the brain. This 1850 painting is by William Howell Deverell, and it shows Act II, Scene IV of Shakespeare's play. Left to right (I'm assuming): Viola as Cesario, Duke Orsino, and Feste.

Happy Twelfth Night!

It's the first week of winter quarter, so I'm a little distracted with settling into classes and whatnot. I'm taking an intro linguistics class, astrobiology, and German 102, and I'm quite excited about all of it.

In honour of today's holiday (though it's late in the day, I know), I'm going to quote some of my favourite lines from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Which, really, has no relevance to the holiday. (Yes this is a filler post. Just letting you know I'm still here. And Shakespeare's always worth quoting.) I've seen Twelfth Night in five different productions, one of which I worked on (and thus saw countless times), so it's a play I'm extremely familiar with. I don't know that it's one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, but it's definitely got sentimental value for me.

Orsino:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die. (I.i.)

Malvolio:
But be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em. (II.v.)

Viola:
A blank, my lord. She never told her love
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more: but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (II.iv.)

Olivia:
O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give
out divers schedules of my beauty: it shall be
inventoried, and every particle and utensil
labelled to my will: as, item, two lips,
indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to
them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were
you sent hither to praise me? (II.iii.)

Feste:
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. (V.i.)

From this copy of the text. Which is missing one of my favourite Sea Captain lines, or I'd have quoted that too.

Books of the Year 2009: Nonfiction, Short Fiction, and Plays

I read 4 books of nonfiction this year, but my favourite is clear. I read 18 plays, mostly for school. Four of my reads I consider short fiction. I'm kind of arbitrarily deciding how many favourites I get in each section, it's just how many seem to fit there--one nonfiction, two short fiction, three plays.

Nonfiction
The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, would definitely be in the running for most enjoyable book in any category this year. It is 529 pages but I absolutely sped through it. I forget how much I love biographies, but this was biography at its best, giving both a picture of its subjects' personalties and a clear view of their place in history. I found it completely fascinating. Original post here.

Short Fiction
The Lady in the Van, by Alan Bennett, doesn't quite count as fiction at all, because it's a true story and is mostly made up of Alan Bennett's diary entries about Miss Shepherd, the woman who lived in her van on the author's door step for 20 years. Despite its truth, though, I'm including it here because it is a story, and isn't comprehensive the way nonfiction would be. It was one of those stories that induced compulsive reading aloud, and I loved it. Original post here.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is kind of a given for good short fiction. It's one of those books that is an experience to read, because it's so evocative and intuitive. I'm sorry I never really wrote a post about it; I would have liked to revisit my initial reactions. But I know it was good.

Plays
It feels somehow like cheating to include The Real Inspector Hound, by Tom Stoppard, since I didn't just read it, I produced it and costumed it and assistant stage managed it. But all that aside, it is a good play. It's one you sort of have to read more than once to get the full meaning out of, because it has so many layers. It's very good fun, and I can't resist theatre about theatre.

The Zoo Story, by Edward Albee, is a short, contained play. What I liked was the language, something about the two characters' expressions, the way it rolled. I don't know that I would have expected this to be the one play out of the thirteen from my comparative literature class that I liked best, or even that it absolutely is the best, but it's one I know I'll remember.

What can I say about Shakespeare's King Richard III? It always feels odd somehow to put a Shakespeare play on a list like this. But I suppose there's some Shakespeare I wouldn't put on this list, so putting Richard III here works. I thought he was a fascinating character, historically accurate or not, and this play does have some really great lines.

On the Table: Books

Still plodding along in The Children's Book. Not that it's at all an unpleasant sort of plodding, but it is a book one has to read deliberately, and it is very long. But I do have a lot of other exciting books I'm looking forwards to.

First up is Past Imperfect, by Julian Fellowes. I know the fellow, of course, because he's an actor, notably in Monarch of the Glen. I can see him being a good writer, though, and the subject of the book sounds intriguing. The narrator is contacted by his old friend Damian, from whom he has been estranged for 40 years, asking for help. The narrator then revisits the summer of 1968, when the friends became estranged, in order to help Damian, and the book sounds particularly interesting to me because it takes place in the side-by-side and occasionally meeting worlds of the upper class, debutantes and such, and the "Swinging Sixties."

Also tempting is The Lodger Shakespeare, by Charles Nicholl. I originally talked about it here, so you might remember it.

I also have Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë (the Oxford University Press edition). I love reading letters, but I don't tend to get through them all at once so I'll probably read this bit by bit. The Brontës are always fascinating, and I'm sure Charlotte's letters will offer an interesting look into her life.

Ages and ages ago, I read Jo Walton's Farthing, and started Ha'penny, and then school started and I got distracted by all sorts of other things. I'd love to get back to Ha'penny.

Last, Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock. I read some of this years and years ago, but I'm sure I was too young for it. The Children's Book brought it back to mind, and it's been on the to-read pile for a while, so hopefully I can get around to it soon.

So all that ought to last me at least until Christmas, at which point I will probably acquire more books that need to be read. Something from Persephone will have to be read at some point fairly soon, and I'm feeling a Jane Austen reread coming on.

On the Table: Plays

There are three plays I want to see in the month of December. I don't know if I'll make it to all of them, but I would like to. Theater Schmeater is doing At Home at the Zoo, by Edward Albee. This play began as The Zoo Story, a one act, but Albee later wrote a sort of prequel to it, and then mandated that they always be performed together as a full-length play. I read The Zoo Story for my comparative literature class, and it was one of my favourites, so I'd be pretty interested in seeing it performed.

The Bathhouse Theatre is putting on its yearly production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I've never seen it though it seems they've been doing it for nine years, so it might be fun to finally see it. And I know some of the actors from Lebensraum.

The one I'm most excited for, however, is Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of Equivocation. I say it's the Rep's, but actually it's traveled from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I don't know if much has changed in the production since it was performed there, but I was told (by someone whose opinion on theatre I trust a great deal) that I absolutely had to see it. So I shall see it. It's about Shakespeare, apparently, and contains overtones of King Lear and Macbeth, and you know how I love picking out references like that.

So expect to hear more about these. And also expect to hear about what's next in terms of reading, too, since the quarter's coming to its end and I'll have more time to read soon.

A look at Shakespeare

I got a package from my father the other day. This does not sound particularly entertaining, until you learn that it came in a University Bookstore box and was no doubt sent from there, since my father works in the shipping department, and that I live five blocks away from the University Bookstore. Oh, my parents. It was fun to get mail, though.

Anyway, in the box I found a Halloween card, a bar of chocolate, and two books. One of them was the play Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel, which does look interesting, but the other book is the one that particularly caught my eye.

This is The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl. Apparently there is a record of the testimony Shakespeare gave in a court case over an unpaid dowry in 1612, the only spoken words of his that are recorded. His testimony relates to his time as a lodger in the house of a French immigrant family called the Mountjoys, and the biography focuses on this period in his life and his circumstances when he lived there. I've never read a biography of Shakespeare, and while I assume the book will go into some discussion of the rest of his life, I think it will be fascinating to read something about him so closely focused. And something which sounds surprisingly original for a book about Shakespeare.

I'm really looking forward to reading this. Let's hope I can find some time for it.

More small change

It seems I've finally got back into the swing of reading. Reading all the book blogs I go through daily, visiting bookstores, starting a new book, all these things help. Mostly it's just the fading of the terrible week I had, things calming down a little, still not perfect but at least now books manage to distract me again. The new book I started, which is mostly what got me back into it, is Ha'penny, sequel to Farthing. I like it already. It's got many of the same charms Farthing had, without being a repeat. It preserves the back and forth first person main female character's chapters alternating with Inspector Carmichael's third person chapters. This time the woman telling the story is Viola Larkin, who has a sort of similar storytelling manner to Lucy Kahn of the last book, but who is definitely her own character.

The story basically begins when Lauria Gilmore, a middle-aged, well-respected actress, is blown up by a bomb in her own house. Inspector Carmichael and Seargent Royston of Scotland Yard are called in to investigate, and once again the two worlds of the alternating chapters are very related but have yet to quite meet.

This book adds another layer of my interests, with Viola Larkin being a member of an aristocratic family who has estranged herself from her parents in order to go on the stage. I've yet to reach anything much about the theatre in the book, but it begins with Viola agreeing to play Hamlet. And you know how I feel about Hamlet. So the discussions of how the play would work with Hamlet as a woman are very interesting.

I'll say more about the book when I've finished it, but it's definitely begun well what with getting me back to reading and in the course of that even to picking up Brideshead Revisited again.

There's many a man hath more hair than wit

And here's proof of what Tam Lin does to my reading--not just Euripides but Shakespeare, E.R. Eddison, and a smattering of poets. I finished Tam Lin, promptly got out the Norton Anthology and just as promptly gave this over for my Complete Works of Shakespeare, and read Comedy of Errors. I've never seen this play, and not read it before. Shakespeare in the park was doing it this summer, and I did very much mean to go see it but with one thing and another never did. It's a very interesting play though in some ways distinguishes itself from the others, and I begin to see how greatly varied Shakespeare's plays can be. There's less of romance than most of the comedies I'm familiar with. By the formula of those I've read before, the comedy and the errors should be in mistaken identity which turns out funny situations between lovers, but not one of these characters is really much of a lover. It's a very funny play. I noticed far more couplets than seems usual, and is it just me or is this rather a shorter play? But I liked it. It's more symmetrical and better tied off than Twelfth Night.

Having finished both Tam Lin and Comedy or Errors, I then got the great joy of choosing a new book off the stack. I'm still reading The Mother Tongue, mind you, but slowly, and I like to have a novel on the go at the same time. So I picked The Worm Ouroboros, which I've already started and put aside twice, and which is a Tam Lin-associated book so hopefully that particular wave of reading inspiration will last me the book, at least until it begins to carry its own weight.

This evening, the lasting effects of Tam Lin in combination with watching History Boys produced a desire for some poetry, so I hauled out another literature textbook I for unknown reasons possess, and read a bit. For some reason Keats' "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" is at present particularly in my mind (maybe because Homer is), despite a little whirlwind tour of modern poetry (which according to this book begins with Hardy). I still associate "silent, upon a peak in Darien." with Swallows and Amazons. The poem in general I associate with Tam Lin, but the bit about Darien is all Swallows and Amazons.

Had I read something out of the 18th century and something medieval, I'd have sort of done a stop on my tour in at least one bit of every age, and I did do drama, novel, and poetry, which is rather a lot for one day, really. I have to confess I have gotten pretty much nothing done but reading.

On Borrowed Wings

On Borrowed Wings, by Chandra Prasad, is a book whose plot is easily summarized. I should know, because I've told quite a few people about it, and said that it's about a girl, Adele, who dresses as her brother Charles and goes to Yale in 1936, 33 years before Yale admitted female undergraduates. The plot is simple, yes, but what it explores is not simple at all. I first heard about this book over at A Work in Progress, which was what inspired me to look for it on the library shelves.

Novels of female crossdressing are familiar--Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness Quartet (probably known to most people as "the Alanna books") stands out to me simply because it was the first one I ever read, long before I would have thought to question the implications of such a plot. And it's not just that I was too young when I read them, those novels simply don't go very deep into it. Twelfth Night, of course, is another example, and I'm sure there are other Shakespeare plays like this.
On Borrowed Wings is unique in what I've read in questioning what this story means in terms of gender. As a boy Adele can achieve more, have more opportunities, but to what degree must she really become a boy, how does this affect her as a girl? One forgets, almost, to think of her as a girl at all. Even when she reveals herself as female to another character, I had trouble thinking of her as a girl, couldn't tell if the other character changed how they interacted with her, wondered if she'd changed her voice in momentarily becoming, even partially, a girl. Adele wonders at one point in the book if she even still knows how she sounds as a girl. Only once after arriving at Yale does she put her girl's clothes on. Even without any clothes at all, her gender is still questionable. One wonders how much gender really matters at all. Amelia Earhart also appears in the book; Adele is not the only character who's changed something about what her gender means. And then, of course, Adele is heterosexual as a woman, but homosexual as a man, and what difference does this make?

Apart from the subject matter, it's a good book. The writing is, for the most part, unremarkable, and sometimes a little self-conscious, but it has certain moments of loveliness. I took note of one bit, early on in the novel: "All I carried with me on the train was the carpetbag and a woebegone suitcase. It surprised me that my world, swollen to the breaking point with fancies and fears, could be contained in these meager spaces." It was well-plotted and often a bit suspenseful; at least, I never quite knew how it was going to end.

The book leaves many paths open, a profusions of opportunity for speculation as to how Adele's future might go. It doesn't answer the questions it raises about who Adele is as a woman or a man, and it leaves open who she might finally become, if she becomes either definitely. And it's a very hopeful book. Knowing as we do what the future beyond 1936 looks like, we know that whatever Adele becomes she will have her chances.

And I have a feeling I'm going to be on the lookout for more books with characters of dubious gender.

Summer theatre

Saturday night, surprise surprise, I went to a play. Or, rather, two plays.

Last summer I worked at Seattle Children's Theatre as a costume assistant, helping costume their Summer Season shows, which are all performed by children. It was a fabulous experience, and I had a lot of fun seeing the shows. I'm not working there this summer, but I figured I'd still go and see the shows. I missed the first two, which were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but I made it to the second two (though it was rather a trial, with breaking down cars and very late two trucks and parades). These plays are all one-acts, two an evening, so I saw Sideways Stories from Wayside School and A Midsummer Night's Macbeth.

I loved Sideways Stories from Wayside School the book, by Louis Sachar, when I was little, and the play was equally hilarious. I found I remembered the book surprisingly well--I must have read it multiple times. I recognized several of the actors from shows last year, and goodness, can these kids act. The actors are usually between about 9 and 16 years old, and they're always great, and very funny.

A Midsummer Night's Macbeth had me laughing pretty much all the way through, though possibly not on its own steam--it was funny because it was all so familiar, and also through a funny coincidence. I was sitting there during intermission reading the program, and looked at the cast list for this show to realize that my boyfriend's stepsister was playing the main character. And then I looked around the audience and saw her mother. So that was funny to begin with. The show is the sequel (of sorts) to High School Hamlet, which was one of my two favourite plays last year, and it's about a high school drama program trying to put on a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth rather intruding into the proceedings. It was mostly hilarious because a high school drama program with no money and lots of drama and the constant struggle to actually produce a play is where I've been the last four years, so I recognized all of it. Not to mention, there was a character who was the resident techie, and being a techie myself, I always like it when they're not left out of representations of theatre. The techie, of course, kept saying things like, "Wait, did that stage direction just say this character gets dismembered? Um, how are we going to do that?" and then being jealous of the rival school's fly system and floor mics and asking to see the booth and getting all excited about it. This character was pretty much an exact picture of my boyfriend. Really, exact. It was a well done play in general, but that was what made me love it.

I'm afraid my reviewing of these plays does you no good if now you want to see them, but I figure I'll plug the next two weekends of shows, as they're sure to be pretty good. Next weekend is Rent: School Edition (I know, I'm skeptical too, but we'll see), and the weekend after that is Once on this Island, Jr. and Romeo and Juliet. The week after that there's also the Young Actor Institute Showcase, which I saw the dress rehearsal of last year and am rather excited about seeing this year.

A bit more theatre.

The second day of Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival now over, for me at least. Unfortunately the weather has taken a turn for the worst, rain and thunderstorms predicted, and yes, we have had both. Lovely timing, dear Seattle weather, this is the first it's rained in three weeks. I saw Twelfth Night this morning, and happily they decided to move the whole business off the stage and under some trees, to keep everybody a little bit dryer. The trees unfortunately blocked sightlines a little bit, but it wasn't too much of a problem and it was certainly fair pay for being out of the rain.

Twelfth Night is my best-known Shakespeare play. I have seen it four times, plus the film, and been part of one production of it. If you give me a couple of lines, I can probably tell you what the next one is. It's certainly not my favourite play (I'm betting that's Hamlet), but I know it pretty much back to front, and as such I definitely have a certain fondness for it.

I liked this production of Twelfth Night (put on by Young Shakespeare Workshop) better than the two professional productions I've seen, which is a bit funny. Nearly all the actors were fabulous (Feste, I'm sad to say, was a bit boring, and I thought Maria could have had more fun with it). I especially liked Viola and Sebastian, who were both played by girls and who, I'm told, switch off twins between shows. I also particularly liked Malvolio, and I'm biased about Olivia, who is a good friend of mine (and isn't it funny how this play always in some way mirrors life but gets it a little bit wrong--Olivia and Malvolio in real life are a couple). The costumes were all absolutely gorgeous (I've never yet, in four viewings, seen this play in Elizabethan costume), rather Victorian.

I didn't manage to see the other two plays I meant to see today, it was too cold to sit on the ground for large amounts of time, and I missed the beginning of King John and I hate seeing only bits of things. That's all right. I'll see Comedy of Errors and King John next weekend, and Taming of the Shrew the weekend after that.

A little bit of theatre

Day one of the Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival! There are nine different plays being put on in Volunteer Park over the course of the weekend, seven of which are Shakespeare (well, there are two different productions of Taming of the Shrew), and I've been to see the beginning of them today. I saw The Merry Wives of Windsor and Richard III. Also playing today were Taming of the Shrew (the same production I saw a couple of weeks ago on the Fremont Troll), The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and this evening The Comedy of Errors. I decided not to stay for Comedy of Errors, since I want to see Twelfth Night at 11 o'clock tomorrow morning because I have friends in it and I know I won't get up that early if I get home that late.

Merry Wives of Windsor was good fun, if rather silly. Some of the various random people/servants/etc wore signs around their necks saying who they were (Servant, Another Servant, Taller Servant, Not Actually French, Ford In Disguise, and so on), which they switched out to play different characters. I'm not entirely sure what the justification behind that was, although it was certainly funny.

I think I've seen enough Shakespeare now to be able to say with reasonable certainty that I like the tragedies/histories better than the comedies. The comedies can certainly be done very well (I liked Taming of the Shrew on the troll a lot), but the acting in the tragedies usually seems to be more interesting. Richard III was great. You may remember how in January I took a little tour of Richard III, and read/watched several things related to him. I was definitely very keen to finally see the play on a stage (or in some grass, rather), and was definitely not disappointed. Richard was played by George Mount, who was very good, and who I must say I hoped was playing Richard when I saw all the actors getting ready before the play. I also really liked the Queen (Elizabeth, the one who was mother of the Prince of Wales), I liked her acting (I don't have the program to tell you who the actress was). Everyone in this play, in fact, acted very well.

It's rather nice now to have seen enough plays to recognize actors all the time. The fellow who played Irwin in History Boys was Earl Rivers, and Laertes from last year's much-loved Hamlet was Catesby. No doubt there will be more familiar actors in tomorrow's plays, Twelfth Night, King John, and Taming of the Shrew. I'll talk about those plays in the next couple days. And yes, at some point, I will finally get around to reviewing The Dud Avocado.

Adventures with Richard III

I can now add Richard III to my short but slowly growing list of Shakespeare plays that I am familiar with. (The list is Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and Richard. It is a sad list, but it was much smaller before last summer so there is hope yet.) I can also add Richard III and his contemporaries to the list of bits of history that I am familiar with.

In the last week or so, I have read Shakespeare's play, watched the film with Sir Ian McKellen, watched the (really odd) film with Al Pacino, and read The Daughter of Time, which is Josephine Tey's mystery novel disproving of Richard's villainy.

There is probably nothing I can say about Shakespeare that has not already been said, so I shall talk about The Daughter of Time. I enjoyed it greatly. It is very short, at 208 pages, and once I got into it I positively raced through. It is not your usual mystery novel, since the detective is bedridden though the whole thing and is solving a mystery 400 years old. Alan Grant, our detective, is very bored lying in bed in the hospital, and his actress friend Marta brings him copies of a bunch of portraits of historical personages with mysteries connected to them. Richard III's portrait is added half by accident, since he doesn't have a famous mystery associated. Alan Grant, who is a student of faces, looks at Richard's and cannot imagine how this man can have murdered his nephews to get the throne. He then goes on to solve the mystery of who could have murdered the nephews instead.

Josephine Tey is a very good writer, though she has an interesting style--there are very large sections that are very nearly all dialogue, with no he said she saids at all. She's excellent at realistic dialogue, though, so this is almost never jarring. I only started to get confused as to who was speaking later in the book, but I think that was because I was so into the story that I stopped paying close attention.

I think I may have to read more mystery novels. This is the last book to be read for Senior Lit, and then the only other book I know I have to read for school is Mansfield Park, and after that I can read anything I want. I may have to make a foray into Agatha Christie, and also Dorothy Sayers.

Three Short Books

In the spirit of the year's ending, I've been trying to finish as many books as possible, for various reasons. The last three books of the year (there's really no chance I'll finish another before the end of the day; I have a New Year's party to go to) are all quite short, but I enjoyed them all rather a lot.

We begin with King Lear, which I suppose doesn't really count as a book; it's a play, written by a nice fellow you may have heard of. I read it mostly because the third season of Slings and Arrows sees the New Burbage Festival putting it on, but also because I am on quite the Shakespeare kick. I watched the BBC's Derek Jacobi Hamlet yesterday, which was quite good (though ridiculously long, at three and a half hours). I had not been previously acquainted with the story of King Lear, apart from a vague recollection that oh, yeah, that's the one where they pull the guy's eyes out. Anyway, it was very enjoyable, and I was rather surprised to find several very familiar quotes in it ("O, reason not the need"). Apart from that, it got me thinking about how susceptible I am to dialect in books and films. I don't know if it's more than most people, but every time I watch Monarch of the Glen I start thinking in Scottish, I watch Torchwood I think in Welsh (not the language, obviously). Reading Storming Heaven, or The Beans of Egypt, Maine, I started thinking in those dialects to a rather alarming degree. I read Shakespeare or watch it, and for about twelve hours afterwards can't stop my syntax from going Shakespeare, or my word choice. Funnily enough, I watch a film with English dialects, I don't usually start thinking in English. I think it's because I watch so many English things (very nearly to the exclusion of all else) that it sounds almost completely normal to me.

Discussing the various essays I wrote for college applications with my Senior Lit teacher, she mentioned that the way I write is very distinctly influenced by Victorian literature. I know this is true, especially in writing a formal essay, and frankly I rather like it. It would be interesting, I think, to compare how much literature has influenced the way I write and speak with how it has influenced someone else.

Yesterday, I got The Tales of Beedle the Bard from the library, J.K. Rowling's new book. On one glance at the margins I said to my mother, "I'll have this finished in an hour," and I was almost exactly right. It was very short, but rather pleasing, and the stories all rang true as proper fairytales--it is possible to write a fairytale and have it come out sounding like something else.

I've been reading Five Children and It for months, on and off, ever since I brought it home from the free book table at school, and just today have I finished it. The funny thing about reading E. Nesbit is that I never read her as a child, but I did read Edward Eager, who is so alike E. Nesbit, but who came after her. In my mind Edward Eager came first, but I feel as though actually I did read E. Nesbit just because I might as well have. I have the same sentimental attachment to her writing as I do to books I read when I was young despite having never read her, because she's so like other books I did read, Edward Eager's and even to some extent Arthur Ransome's, which all epitomized what I always wanted my childhood to be like. I wanted to be an early 20th century English child, with about three siblings. I still want that. It's a lovely book, anyway, because it plays to everyone's childish wishes; even adults still subconsciously wish for all the sorts of things the children ask of the Psammead.

This was a very rambling post; I shall now end it.

In the absence of...

So, I got my snow day. I did not, however, get much reading done. I put this down to the fact that it never actually snowed. They closed schools for nothing. In fact, all the snow that was on the ground from last weekend melted. It's still supposed to snow three inches tonight, but it was supposed to snow two inches today so I'll just cross my fingers and hope it actually snows.

I didn't read, but I did watch a fabulous tv show and make a lot of paper chains. The tv show is Slings and Arrows, which is a Canadian series from a few years ago about a theatre company. It's very well acted, is often shot in an interesting manner, has loads of Shakespeare and theatre references that make my inner Shakespeare geek wriggle with glee, and is altogether a lot of fun. Plus, the first season is about the company putting on Hamlet. You know how I feel about Hamlet. Also, it has the best theme songs ever, which have been completely stuck in my head for the last two days. It's funny how I came to watch it--I was at my best friend's birthday party last weekend, where of the thirteen or so people only one of us was not a theatre geek, and we were all telling theatre stories and talking about how we really wanted to see this show. And then I came home and there it was sitting by the tv. It was quite a fabulous coincidence.

So now I'm looking up what plays are on at local theatres.