Further to last night's Question One, I really enjoyed Big Faced Frank Finlay's first appearance as Van Helsing here in this BBC adaptation from 1977, (which is hopefully where this video starts). His bedside manner's very convincing. He feels like an actual doctor, which makes the vampirism all the more convincing as a disease. There's a lot I liked about this adaptation, which I came to via this piece in The Chiseler praising the focus given to Judi Bowker's Mina (and I bet you money Mel Brooks watched it). As the Count, Louis Jordan gives the impression that he at least thinks he was perfectly cast, which might be all one needs, it's certainly all he needs, and the cutting-edge, nineteen-seventies video effects used sparely, but unahsamedly, to signal Dracula's reality-fracturing otherness is a pretty good match for the proto-modernist surrealism of Stoker's book. The only real problem is its fidelity to the source, a problem no adaptation I've seen has managed to solve. Cure's aren't thrilling. So the opening's superb - staying at Dracula's castle is a hard episode to get wrong - and the fall of Lucy is similarly gripping - there's no obvious nod to The Exorcist, but attention has clearly been paid - but once Lucy's "saved" there's no escaping the fact the climax is a band of heroes who all get on chasing, basically, just a box, accompanied by a heroine who needs to lie down a lot, which is hardly Jaws.
Shame if something... happened to it." Count Dracula
And I haven't seen the final episode of the latest BBC Dracula yet, but given that the first two roll out the usual Gatiss/Moffat triumph-of-the-will pissing contest between intellectual bullies whose every move is nevertheless either two steps behind the audience or too stupid to have been entertained, I'm not gagging for more. I mean, I'm honestly sure Mark Gatiss is a properly lovely man, but everything he writes suggests someone who loves the past without being remotely interested in history, and it's hard not to feel right now that that's making the world shitter.
Chuck Jones originally referred to this character as "Antwerp"
apparently because he looked like both an ant and a twerp.
We did another quiz. Here's my round. No pictures. It falls apart a bit at the end. I've posted the answers in the comments.
1. ODD ONE OUT
Which of these actors has never played Van Helsing:
Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins,
Christopher Plummer, Herbert Lom, Hugh Jackman, Mel Brooks, Dolly
Wells, David Suchet, Frank Finlay or Weird Al Yankovic?
2 & 3. THE GAME OF THE THRONES
"Standupstraight Taily" and "Ignore Subtractty" are the opposite of WHICH TWO ACTORS who played royalty in the show? (Someone suggested a whole "Game of Thrones" round but not enought of us had seen it. I, for example, hadn't seen it.)
4. ODD ONE OUT (AGAIN. A LOT OF THESE WERE GOING TO BE ODD ONE OUT.)
Which of these is not a Font: Hoe Down, Saddlebag, Van Cleef, Paleface or Wantedo? (This took far longer to research than I hoped, because nearly everything, it turns out, is a font.)
5. VAGUE THREATS
Which film came first?
A. "It! The Terror from Beyond Space"
B. "It Came From Outer Space!"
C. "The Thing (From Another World!)"
D. "Them!"
6. SPECIFIC THREATS
Which of these is the second Godzilla movie?
A. "Son of Godzilla"
B. "Destroy All Monsters"
C. "Godzilla Raids Again"
D. "Godzilla versus King Kong"
7. TERRIBLE QUESTION
What do these directors have in common, given Question 8: Peter Weir, Alan J. Pakula, George Lucas, or Mike Nichols (Noone got either of these. It was a rushed question. I... I'm not sure it even makes sense.)
... & 8. TERRIBLE QUESTION FOLLOW-UP
What director is double the answer to Question 7? (See parenthesis to 7)
9. ODD ONE OUT AGAIN
Yeah. Just which of these is the odd one out?
Barney Rubble, Captain Caveman, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd?
10. THIS WAS GOING TO BE ANOTHER ODD ONE OUT QUESTION, ABOUT THE MANDELA EFFECT, BUT I COULDN'T THINK OF A TRUE FACT THAT MIGHT CONVINCINGLY BE MISTAKEN FOR A FALSE MEMORY SO THIS ENDED UP AS JUST A BOG STANDARD TRIVIA QUESTION
What brand takes its name from its two original main ingredients sodium perborate and sodium silicate?
"The river was a place for children... but it wasn't a nice place for children." Mudlarker Lara Maiklam, maritime historian S.I. Martin and senior
curator of the Royal Observatory Louise Devoy join Helen Czerski for a
look under the hood in this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars, while I can be heard reading a nineteenth-century engraver's gush. It is, as ever, the good stuff.
I'm dropping us three and a half minutes into this video because even more enjoyable than footage of somebody actually getting around in one of these (viewable if you watch it from the beginning) is the tiny loop of incredibly stirring music over somebody trying this out for the first time. See if you agree. It's no Asgardia but what can I say? Bathos makes me feel snuggly. Feel the power.
Four no-budget one-man productions of Shakespeare is all well and good, but nothing I make this year's going to top Je Suis Mermaid, so I thought I'd put that on youtube too, and am indebted to those who told me to check out the channel's auto-generated closed captions. (At least it got that I was speaking French). Here:
[Musique] À
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la merde. J'ai [Musique]
Laissé le temps au top. Je suis dans la merde.
À nous maintenant de six: Qu'est ce que c'est que tu fais aujourd'hui
À Cannes? De nos francs, dix marocain poisson à totino médecine gland.
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la mer.
Hays s'élève á tizi disquaire day one.
Approcher sakuma cheveaux gris mat à lieu à Kiev.
Merci Monsieur merci Monsieur mais il fait aussi fonction.
Merci Monsieur de six à dieu, c'est la mer et le
cadeau dinars mais Séguinaud lance
Marie vêtus de blanc. Merci monsieur [Musique]
Si ça dure [Musique]
Remercier monsieur vers ma chère.
Voilá merci monsieur français à dieu. [Musique]
[Music] At
I am my m. I live in shit. I have [Music]
Time left on top. I'm in shit.
To us now from six: What is it that you do today in Cannes?
Of our ten francs, Moroccan fish with totino medicine acorn.
I am my m. I live at the sea.
Hays amount to tizi record store day one.
Approach his mat gray hair sakuma takes place in Kiev.
Thank you sir thank you sir but it also works.
Thank you sir from 6 to God, it's the sea and the dinars gift
but séginuad launches
Marie dressed in white. Thank you sir [Music]
If it lasts [Music]
Thank you sir towards my dear.
Here is thank you French mister to God. [Music.]
Apparently Seginaud was a French cyclist. Obviously I love this.
My guess is Stephen Cheatley
took this. It's Blackpool, last night. I saw
the crescent myself over Shepherd's Bush roundabout, as I'd finally
let myself out for a walk, and I'd been looking out for it because I'd
just learnt that it signaled Eid. That's not why the crescent moon's the symbol of Islam though - strictly
speaking there actually is no "symbol" for Islam. The
founder of the New Crescent Society, Imad Ahmed, gives a beautiful
account of his coordination of nationwide sightings of this moon in
the episode of Ships, Sea and the Stars below, for which I provide a reading of one of the happier moments in Ernest Shackeltons' life. Beyond its Judeo-Christian roots I'd always known next to nothing about Islam, other than a conversation I'd had in Berlin where I was corrected on an assumption made that Muslims also believed that God was Love: "I don't believe that. I believe God is Time." And according to Ahmed, the Arabic word for crescent moon, hilal, comes from a Semitic root meaning 'to scream out for joy', the same root in fact as hallelujah.
Still on the subject of outlines, last week's episode featured this map of British shipping routes from 1937. I found it extraordinary to suddenly look upon the land as negative space...
And the episode's packed with wonderful instances of making the invisble visible. There's a lot about shipping containers to, and the history of Greenwich, so obviously I was reminded quite a bit ofThe Boy who Climbed Out of His Face, and I'm reading some Conrad in this one (Heart of Darkness was one of the inspirations for the show, besides The Water Babies) and a poem called "Cargoes", which appears to have been something of a set text, but was new to me.
What a composition! I don't know how Derek Waters' Drunk History operates but I've always loved the results, and following on from yesterday's story of the brothers Booth here's more: I never knew, for example, that a century before before Michael Palin, two nineteenth-century journalists,
Nellie
Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, simultaneously beat Phileas Fogg's circumnavigation of the world by
over
a week unaware they were racing each other because they were
travelling in opposite directions...
Or that Rosa Parks' bus protest was actually an attempt to recreate
the earlier arrest of Claudette Colvin, whom the NAACP had considered too young and
dark-skinned to be the face of an anti-segregation movement (although I
would have also learnt this later from Paul Sinha's History Revision, but not Doctor Who)...
Or that the Lone Ranger was real, and also black...
Or that the film Dog Day Afternoon paid for the surgery that the bank heist it depicted failed to, or that the perps portrayed in it by Al Pacino and John Cazale were already huge fans of The Godfather...
Or that the "Scopes Monkey Trial" was a publicity stunt designed to help the Depression-hit economy of Dayton, Tennessee...
Or, finally, anything about Margaret Howe Lovatt and John Lilly's experiments into LSD and wanking off dolphins. (Okay, that's where I've seen Duncan Trussell before. If you've seen his cartoon The Midnight Gospel on Netflix, this explains quite a bit.)
(Here's a little about how the show operates. I know there's a British version too now but without someone there to tell the story too, something seems out. Also, are British comedians not allowed to get as drunk?)
That's John Wilkes Booth above left playing Mark Antony, ironically perhaps given he was the Booth who'd actually go on to assassinate someone, and that's his initially more famous brother Edwin as Brutus to his right with their brother Junius Jr. as Cassius. Maybe of all the big roles in Julius Caesar, Antony was just considered the most actor-proof. Has any other single play proved so historically significant? Assassination's played such a disproportionate part in the history of America, a country so influenced by an idea of Rome, that idea so influenced by Julius Caesar. Here's the full story:
And, again according to wikipedia, as early as 1937 Orson Welles was reframing the play as a parable of Fascism, a political phenomenon Shakespeare documents with astonishing acuity given he was writing over three hundred years before it happened, but maybe it all seemed so familiar because in providing us with the warning Shakespeare was also writing the handbook. And what could we do with that warning, anyway? Cassius' contempt in Act One for the people he's proposing to "liberate" seems just as prescient, although not necessarily unjustified given Shakespeare's depiction of the mob. It's almost a trademark of Shakespearean
tragedy that it's always the wrong people who are right.
Here's the whole thing:
And here's "Titus" again, showing just how bad things would get. The opening victory of the chaotic but ruthless tyrant Saturninus over the principled but patronising democrat Bassianus is almost Julius Caesar in microcosm:
And here's "Shrew", doing for the institution of marriage what "Two Gents" did for courtly love:
And here's "Two Gents". We get to call them these now that we're experts:
And finally here's Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year:
So that's over fifteen hours now of me talking out of the side of my mouth, something I had no idea I did until I made these. No, I like it. Shows a lack of training. Adds character. Thanks again to all who've supported me, and this, and here's a rattling cup for anyone who wants to be in that number.
Just when I think I couldn't love Gaius Cassius Longinus any more, in Act Five he turns out to "hold Epicurus strong and his opinion" - which I did have to look up - but which puts him squarely on Team Cosmos, as opposed to the Chaos summoned by Mark Antony. Reading Epicurus' wikipedia entry it's hard to find anything to disagree with: "He advocated that people were best able to pursue philosophy by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends." It's not until I came to perfom the play I realised this is exactly how Brutus doesn't spend his final scene. Instead he's surrounded by people we've never met, presumably all that's left, and it makes his embarrassed whispering in their ears even more pitiful (we have to assume the whispering is embarrased, don't we?) SPOILERS: Like Cassius of course, Shakespeare would also die on his birthday, but we have to assume he didn't know that when he was writing. Here's Act Five.
Of all the scenes in Shakespeare, Act 4 Scene 2 of Julius Caesar is the one I've fantasy-cast the most. Over decades, we're talking. In the absence of these casts however, I've never loved the scene as much watching it as I have reading it, so today was exciting, because of course I'll aways fantasy-cast myself as well, but perhaps for the first time on this project - and to the scene's credit - today I also really missed having someone to play off, too. Enjoy.
I'm glad I looked up Atë, mentioned in Antony's curse below. Daughter of the goddess Discordia (above) whose golden apple sparked the Trojan War, Atë is the goddess of ruinous mistakes. According to wikipedia she walks upon the heads of men rather than the earth, possibly another mistake, and like the goddess Brigid she also appears a lot online in paintings by artists who like to use all the colours. No spoilers for Act Three, but I enjoy thinking of Mark Antony as a secret Discordian, a nihilist hedonist, like Charles Manson. There was a time I would have tried to play him less nakedly phoney, but people don't really need to believe a man to follow him, they just need him to give them a role, and it's still astonishing to me how good Shakespeare was at nailing this. The inventor of Rory's Story Cubes might also be a secret Discordian, by the way, given the cubes bear not one but both of the goddess' symbols - the apple and the wheel of chaos - handy for today's opening title anyway.
Alternative titles: The Reading of the Will, or "Pardon me, Julius"
When I finally do another Sung Blog Sunday, I'm definitely going to add words to this.
I had more sleep before recording Act Two, which is ironic, or at least relevant, given the number of characters who can't get to sleep in it. Now I think about it, don't the conspirators pretty much pull an allnighter? I'm not sure what the business with Casca pointing out which way's East with his sword is about. It feels like an in-joke. A heroic pose that loses all its glamour as soon as you turn the sound up. And I'd never noticed until playing this scene that Brutus completely reneges on his promise to tell Portia what's going on. He doesn't even not tell her. He just walks out.
"Cool. Which one are you?"
Watching the edit back, going from Brutus and Portia's scene to Caesar and Calpurnia's I felt an unexpected and overwhelming relief. That might seem odd given the stakes and Calpurnia's dream, but one of the possible advantages of playing every role is that there's very little chance you'll repeat a scene - it's too knackering, for one thing - and so I'd run out of trauma by the time it came to play Calpurnia but I really ike in retrospect how recognisably "married" she and Ceasar appear as a result. It makes sense. Caesar's always been in danger, Calpurnia would be used to this. If they felt any emotional toll she wouldn't be Ceasar's wife. As for my Caeasar, at least two cuddly old men in later plays make references to either being or having played the role and so I decided all three must have been written for the same actor, which is why I've given him a touch of the Wilfrid Hyde-Whites. (Although Gus Brown, who now I think of it played both later roles at University, would also be a great Ceasar.) This same imaginary company member has also turned up as an unnamed Roman in my Titus, and the Pedant in my Shrew. There are other imaginary members of this company. Frankly I can only apologise to my Chiron voice for saddling him once again with the servants.
Fun fact: Two supporting characters swap voices in this act. It was bound to happen.
... the catchphrase of The Establishment (here photographed by Mark Dawson).
Very useful if you're improvising.
Jumping forward in the chronology, to get to a famous one before I take a little break, we come to "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar" whose title seems a bit of a misnomer although I don't want to give anything away. As I say in episode zero, I'd originally considered starting the whole project with this one, not because it was famous so much, but because this seemed one of the easier works for a forty-five-year-old man to stage single-handedly in front of a laptop, and because politics isn't boring at the moment. None of this however excuses how sloppy I am in this first act. There were a lot of parts here I'd been wanting to play for a while. I find the text heart-breaking, but this isone of the few plays of Shakespeare's still approached with a presumption of stiffness. Even if nobody's in a toga, and it certainly doesn't help if you can't get your legs out, the text is so packed with quotes there's a risk of treating the lines like a series of destinations rather than a vehicle, but Cassius for example I think is a piping hot mess, so I was keen to lean into naturalism here, but, again, this does not excuse how sloppy I am in the video. I think the play's opening is one of those "wait, has the play started?" scenes designed to blur the audience's world into the world of the story, which can work so well in somewhere like the Globe and pretty much nowhere else, but, to be absolutely clear, this still does not excuse my sloppiness. The thing is I'd only had four hours sleep. I could have had more, don't worry, but after a particularly long Modern Family binge on Sunday evening I dreamt I was on a Beauty and the Beast-themed roller-coaster-dodgem with Eric Stonestreet whose final collision was timed t coincide exactly with the end of "Be Our Guest", at which point I woke up, far too excited obviously to go back to sleep. But you get the idea. Act One:
On Sunday night some friends and I finally played a home-made zoom quiz. Each of us came up with a round worth ten points, and now here for you to play at home is my own contribution, inspired by images from blog posts I never got round to writing (and one I did). Answers are in the comments.
1. PEOPLE AND PLACES: This is a still from a video taken by someone who sneaked into a private swimming pool WHERE? (Ideally I want something more specific than the city.)
2. PROPS: Name the film this prop is from:
3. COSPLAY: This is a cosplay of WHICH sinister character from a series of childrens' books?
4. CELEBRITIES: Here's George Wendt from Cheers standing behind the hosts of Norwegian nostalgia show Gyle Tider. For just ONE point, name THREE other celebrities from the eighties and nineties who turn up in this video to "Let It Be". (Very few points for this because literally everyone is in it.*)
5. GUESSES: How tall is this statue of deceased Indian statesman Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the tallest statue in the world? Closest guess wins.
6. SCIENCE: This Roman God gave his name to WHICH planet?
7. ART: Name the film for which H. R. Giger produced this ultimately unused concept art:
8. TELEVISION: What's the link?
9 and 10. CELEBRITIES: Name BOTH members of the celebrity Hollywood couple you'll find when doing an image search for this Blue Peter presenter. A point each.
(Titus' sleevelessness seems a bold costume choice, given what's coming.)
I've not much more to say: Shakespeare never stopped having fun with meta-theatrical villains, but Aarons' successors would concentrate more on the mechanics of a convincing performance rather than just seeing what they could get away with, as indeed would Shakespeare. Concerning the play's many classical allusions, Natalie Haynes
Stands Up for the Classics, now on its sixth series, is more than just a great show, it's practically an education, and here's her episode on Ovid, whose Metamorphoses was such a huge influence on not just this play but everyone within it. Natalie doesn't mention the story of Philomel, and who can blame her, but she does talk about
Actaeon, whose fate Tamora threatened Bassianus with, thus: "It's a recurring theme in the Metamorphoses that when people lose their power they lose their voice..." In a reading, losing one's voice can mean complete disappearance, but turning the pages and writing in the sand Lavinia gains her voice again, and that's why I thought we should hear it. It's why I also wanted us to hear the rustling of Titus' letters, and why I didn't want Chiron and Demetrius to scream, because they should vanish as soon as their mouths are stopped. Performing a reading rather than a staging, one notices far more the absences resulting from violence - such as Lavinia's voice, or Titus'
hand - rather than the resultant gore. So I got lucky there. When first staged I think they used real blood, purchased from the butchers, but does
anyone knows how what they did for the scene with Titus' cousins firing arrows up to
Heaven? Elizabethan theatres had open rooves of course, so maybe the actors
just fired arrows into the air and out into the street. That must have
been fun. Finally, while shedding tears over Titus' corpse and
deciding the fates of Aaron and the bodies of Saturninus and Tamora, I don't think anybody in the last scene even mentions Lavinia, even in passing. Here's the whole thing:
Long before I read or saw Titus Andronicus I'd known how it ended because of Brian Cox's Acting in Tragedy posted above, whose standalone quote - "One of the myths I'd like to dispel* is that tragedy cannot be funny" - became a guiding principle for me, and something the play itself seemed to really be leaning into when I finally got round to reading it at university. As I said in my introduction to the play on Monday though (okay, Tuesday) the tone of Titus isn't a mystery, it's Horror, so I tried to give it the full Tobe Hooper, which helped me realise I'll probably need to take a break soon.
Knackering.
However smudgy some of this week's work might be though, at 3:48am on this Saturday morning I can honestly I say I'm really proud of how this turned out. Last Sunday I noted some of the decisions I'd already made (containing spoilers if you haven't already seen the video below):
"The Andronici will probably be Welsh: Titus deep
and exhausted, Marcus level, Lucius bordering on the shrill... Aaron will be a cockerney villain, and cry uncontrollably with laughter recounting his evils in Act 5.... The eating
of the pies will bring Titus no solace at all though, there's no such thing as revenge, and the murder of his daugher will be a
last ditch attempt to find solace in the precedents of mythlogy."
That last decision wasn't necessarily what I ended up playing, which probably comes across as more premeditated, but I knew I had to decide whether or not Lavinia was consenting to her own death, and since in this presentation she'd have no presence because she had no lines, there was no way to signal that consent, so it would have to be without, and since I didn't fancy playing "hey it's an honour killing, they were different times, potato potarto" - and there's nothing in the text to suggest I should - the whole story had to be secretly heading towards this moment, a far darker ending than the more famous serving up of Chiron and Demetrius in pasties, and so tradition had to be monstered, and especially the folly of Titus' even small-c conservatism. The extensive classical references made more sense here too; people were trying to understand their horrible lives through the stories that mirror them. All that I realised on Sunday. Here are some things I only realised today:
I probably had to decide in what state Aaron's child was presented in the final scene, as there's no clue in the actual text whether they're alive or dead. I went with Lucius keeping his oath (that's me mewling in the background, you can probably tell) and I really enjoy how it affects Aaron's final line... Aaron's mocking pronunciation of "god" felt like maybe one quirk too many until I came to Lucius having to say the word immediately afterwards, and then it felt like a good and useful gag, speaking of which... I hadn't been paying nearly enough attention to
Tamora this week. I'd decided she would be Scottish but that was
kind of it (at least I'd decided Bassianus would be boring) so I finally put more work into her today, and that "yeah, maybe reel it a touch?" glance she gives Chiron was my favourite thing to look back and watch... After editing the video I realised I'd unconsciously used rain again as a shorthand
for exile. I just thought the scene could do
with some thunder... Having decribed the Emperor as a villian yesterday, I love the intimation that if Titus had actually just come to him with Lavinia's accusations, he would have got justice.
Here's act five, lovelies, and a playlist of all five acts is here.
Has this whole "play every single character in Shakespeare" project just been a cover for me wanting to play Aaron the Moor? It feels a bit like that at the moment. Act Four contains one my favourite scenes in drama and I've always loved how un-Machiavellian a villain Aaron is, but the Emperor, Aaron's opposite in many ways, is an interesting villain too, and this play really nails how many appalling human traits and weaknesses can become frustrating strengths if you're already at the top. Not positives. Strengths. Like acid blood. Saturninus' paranoia certainly seems a more useful superpower than Tamora's cunning. I did toy with providing a voice for the tongueless Lavinia but it just sounded like Chewbacca, or even worse, when I tried dialling down the distress, like Sammy the Crab. Anyway I'm off now to sleep and perform extensive checks on my privilege but in the meantime here's the fourth act of Titus Andronicus, containing racism, rape, and murder, so be warned, and also me trying to do Jim from Friday Night Dinner - actually maybe this whole project has been so I could do that.
Features two deaths, a birth, and many people's favourite Shakespearean comeback.
Words by Alan Moore (again) who hates this now. Art by Brian Bolland, who doesn't.
Appropriately, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's thirteenth episode is Titus Andronicus' Act Three, featuring heaps of wailing and gnashing of teeth lightened only by a quick appearance from the most committedly evil character in English literature. There's no way it wasn't going to be knackering but still, I'm sorry my reading's not a bit more lucid, screaming iambic pentameter isn't much fun to watch. "Going mad" is such a staple of literature, and especially horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking it actually happened. Trauma can make a person feel more removed from reality but that's not the same as "going mad", and to his credit "madness" in Shakespeare was, or at last became, a quite specific idea, a liminal place whose inhabitants - those suddenly hit by trauma or depression - would react as if they've suddenly realised they're characters in a play, physically present in a work of fiction, unrecoverable by reality. So Shakespeare found the stage a useful machine for exploring grief, and even the famous tea-towel-adorning "All the World's A Stage" is spoken by a character called "the melancholy Jacques". In Elizabethan medicine, "melancholy" means "manic". It's no more a celebration than "Born In the USA".
Trigger Warnings: More mutilation, a lot of crying, and the death of a fly.
Catching up on the classics, if not on sleep, and still on the subject of sound effects in iMovie, the single cue above is all that came up when I searched for "horns". It is also a peculiarly accurate six-second summary of the entirety of Titus Andronicus' absolutely pitiless Act Two, presented below with some relief but, after unusually little deliberation for me at least, ultimately no comedy horns.
Trigger Warnings: Rape, Murder, Mutilation, Racism, Hunting and Falling Down Holes.
At midnight last night there was a cut of Act One of Titus Andronicus
all finished and ready to be uploaded to youtube, but it had no
"flourishes" - the trumpets and drums repeatedly referenced in the
stage directions. It had no sound design at all in fact, and that was fine, obviously, these were just meant to be readings. But I had really begun to enjoy how much scene-setting, even world-building, could be done with the right effect (as I said here) and ideally I wanted to give something similar to Titus, especially given how different it was to what had come before and how much the play's version of Rome bordered
on Fantasy (like all Horror). The thing is, though, I'm very indecisive, and
choosing what to add, and whether or not to keep it, takes up at least a third, maybe a half of the total time I'll spend on these videos, and that seems mad. An earlier edit of
Act One (about nine in the evening) was plastered in iMovie's "Suspense" cue in place of the flourishes, a simple electronic chord nothing like a flourish, but an abstraction
which set a mood and didn't sound too ridiculous, yet ultimately had too little going for it beyond just being tolerable (and even that was questionable given how often I was using it - there's only so many times you can hear a "Suspense" chord before it goes from foreboding to dithering). So I dropped all the cues, uploaded the act without flourishes, went for a night walk, and began to think more and more about the "Vintage News" march that I'd earlier dismissed as too wacky.
Material is limited on a night walk.
I did love how un-alien the march had suddenly made Rome, by
which I don't mean that it stopped Rome seeming weird, but that it made
Rome's weirdness far less easy to write off as alien. It meant I wouldn't be presenting the story as a trip to a faraway, savage time, but as a nightmare just a couple of wrong decisions away, in which duty, tradition, processions, seeking for comfort in precedent, the celebration of war and just the very concept of "victory" were all complicit, and fair targets. And so by the time I'd got back from my walk, sticking an old newsreel march with no inkling of tragedy through a "Cathedral" effect to lose the crackle and then playing that over a human sacrifice felt like getting a lot off my chest, which seemed a valid feeling to have when presenting Titus Andronicus. So I re-edited the act (thre's always tweaks) re-downloaded it in place of the original edit, managed to render only about ten minutes before it crashed my laptop, crashed my laptop trying to fix it, crashed my laptop again, crashed my laptop, went to bed, didn't sleep much, woke, had an idea, thought I'd fixed it, uploaded it onto youtube, found out I'd fixed it but hadn't actually finished the edit before uploading it - huge thanks to @Christelle_C for the head-sup - took it down again and had another tinker and so that's why it's only going up now. And why it has the tune for Adam and Joe's "Big British Castle" plastered all over it. Sorry. I know I said I'd keep my youtube and blog more separate form now but, guys, really, this is all I have to show right now so Ta - as I say - daaa:
It would mean a lot of editing though. And that's a surprising number of fake eyes. Not different eyes either, just different ways of portraying eyes. So many eyes. Maybe that's why the picture caught my attention. I just found it on tumblr, but I'm now realising I really want this kit. Imagine if I had all these disguises, how untraceable I'd be! "He went that-a-way" I would say... I wonder who the first person was to say that. Right, according to TV Tropes the ruse turns up in the 14th-Century CE in Luo Ghanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and is later re-used, as a result of convergent evolution perhaps rather than direct influence, by both Les Miserables and the Three Stooges, who I'm guessing added the "-a-". Any other leads greatly appreciated.
Swedish Chef voice: "Three Deee! Three Deee!"* (I think the horrifying clown on the left refusing to wear a mask is Bob Fosse.)
Sorry that this "Saturday's blog" is arriving so late on a Sunday...
When I decided to move from Defoe to Shakespeare, I hadn't considered how big a part silly voices would play in the new undertaking. I just thought it might be fun if one of the outlaws in Two Gentlemen sounded a bit like Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy, and then realised that if he was American, maybe all the outlaws should be American, and then that if everyone in Milan was American I'd have considerably more voices to play with, and viewers might actually be able to tell what was going on, right down to the who's whose, and that whether or not I could actually do any of these voices wasn't the issue as long as I held my nerve and stuck with whatever sound was coming out. Choosing a voice was like choosing a mask: it didn't provide just the illusion of range, it gave a usefully immediate idea of how a character might behave, allowing me to act genuinely differently without having to do anything as creepy as actually putting on a mask. Like wearing a mask however, it also presented the risk that a departure from naturalism would mean a loss of detail... not that a performace couldn't be big - poetry is big - but it shouldn't be unwieldy. Or it should be unwieldy - wielding something unwieldy is part of the fun of it - but you had to still be the person saying the words, you had to, continuing the sword/mace/hammer metaphor, keep a hold on it, not just let go and pretend you're still wielding it. And there were other benefits to using voices whether or not I could actually do them: "regional accents" no longer needed to be the reserve of the non-posh for example, and in a play so concerned with who has the most stuff, associating status with a character's accent seemed an unnecessary distraction. Added to which I find it hard to play convincingly big in my own polite, second-gen Received Pronunciation voice, and I knew I wanted to go into this reading playing it big.
Home continent poster.
Basically I knew that I wanted to honour the trashiness of this play. I don't just mean how well it's traditionally catered to a kind of Renaissance Festival fetishism (perfectly legitimately - Shakespeare includes a scene in which a woman binds her sister's wrists and beats her so kinkiness is a signature feature, although crucially there's no spanking as there would be in "Kiss Me Kate" - the violence meted out on Katherine is restricted to restraint, sleep deprivation and enforced vegetarianism). I would still be reading in my pyjamas, and you'd never see my legs, this would be a hard to honour. What I mean is that, coming to the play knowing it quite well, and not really liking it (and certainly not having any idea how I'd eventually play Katherine's final speech), I at least knew I couldn't do what I'd seen the weekend before in Jonathan
Miller's BBC version which, despite the
casting
of John Cleese - or maybe Cleese was instrumental in this - makes every
effort to spare its audience's blushes by presenting as joyless,
uncomfortable and low energy a Petruccio as possible (maybe in an
attempt to "let the play breathe", but with the same result normally
attending such exercises in "trusting to the text", namely a long,
boring thing doesn't make sense. I knew that if I was going to work out how to like the play, or at least present something likeable, morality would have to go out of the window, and I'd have to present a play of forces. You didn't have to like these people, you just had to enjoy them. And I thought about Kusturica, and how much I'd always enjoyed these dangerous arseholes:
Because Petruccio is Shakespeare's first glamourisation of the human glitch, the
bug that risks sending the system crashing, like Aaron later, or Iago or even Hamlet. He's gonzo, in the Fear and Loathing sense, not the muppet sense, and while making him Australian was a very last minute decision (inspired by how much Germaine Greer weirdly sings his praises in The Female Eunuch) I'm very glad I did because giving him an accent other than mine definitely helped, although it did make his back and forth with the West Country Katherine incredibly fiddly. "Englishness", by which I mean my middle-class-narrator strain of it, carries with it such a sense of existing comfortably within a system, and yet the possibility of comfortably existing within the system is meant to be what's being questioned.
And the European version.
So, yeah, the problem - the problem I didn't know how I was going to
address on Monday - was not Petruccio but Katherine. Because it's one thing to
denounce the grubbiness of the marriage contract by having a possibly
sociopathic anti-hero boldly state announce that his wife is chattel,
but it's quite another to have his headstrong wife publicly agreeing. Katherine isn't just headstrong though, in her treatment of Bianca she is
legitimately a total fucking nightmare (and attempting to
make the play more "feminist" by portraying Bianca as a duplicitous
b-word deserving of such treatment, simply because she's the only woman managing
to single-handedly steer a course through everyone's bullshit seems... well it
doesn't seem very feminist) and so I was fine setting up Petruccio
against Katherine in a kind of Alien Versus Predator way, and I
wasn't worried about portraying both participants as horrible, because
they were discomforting inhabitants of an order that was also horrible.
What I was worried about was presenting a woman falling in love with the man who "breaks" her as a happy ending. So... I
played it as well as I could... day by day, act by act... and by the end of Act Four
there was still no sign of Katherine being broken. She submits, but Hortensio's presence here is crucial, because it means she has a witness to Petruccio's misidentifying of the sun, so she's not gaslit, she's just going along with a stupid game because she has no choice, which is definitely progress. Miller's Shrew showed Kate suddenly having the time of her life with this submission, laughing uncontrollably when pretending Vincentio was a woman, but showing Kate actively enjoy this submission didn't seem necessary or, more crucially, remotely believable. It's just no big deal. By Act Five then, I found Katherine still playable. And she didn't have to be in love when to kiss Petruccio in the street, all I had to play was that she goes along with it. But still. A kiss isa pretty big story beat. Maybe then, it just didn't have to be that big for Katherine, which is how I found myself tolerating what followed. If the kiss floored Petruccio, I thought, some power could be restored to Katherine, and given the play wasn't going to end with the downfall of the patriarchy, maybe great sex could provide a happy ending instead. It didn't seem likely, but thinking along those lines as I continued to read the act, Petruccio certainly seemed goofier now, not remotely furious, and with the rest of the table turning on Katherine, and with Katherine having learnt that pretending wouldn't kill her, her sudden reinvention as the perfect wife seemed perfectly playable again. BUT still not a great ending. UNTIL, reading Katherine's massive speech in the light of a newly soppy Petruccio, I suddenly saw "will" and "kneel" and "smooth" and "parts" and "come", and an exercise in aggressive seduction playfully masquerading as submission, and I saw Katherine playing with her power over Petruccio, and maybe all the men seated there, and then I saw Petruccio's "Come, Katherine, let's to bed" and thought, yeah, that'll do, that's what couples getting married at the end of Shakespearean comedies really means, it's never a story of "happily ever after", it's a story of two people working out the happiest way to end up in bed together. And that's hard to convey when you're a middle-aged man in pyjamas reading from a big book (and I really wish I'd held that eyeline for all of "soft and weak, smooth") but anyway, that is what I think happens at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. Just don't worry about the morning after. You can see me perform the whole play here, let me know if you've any questions.
Act Five of The Taming of The Shrew is now up and as watchable as it ever will be here, and the playlist of all five acts plus "induction" begins below. I'll post actual thoughts tomorrow, but feel free to leave yours in the intervenings.
During this pandemic thousands of rock stacks have appeared in Whitley Bay. The contributors stand and wait and take their turn, a crowd in time but not space. Nobody's suggested the piles are memorials, which is a relief because they're prolific. Owen Humphreys, who took these photos and more, is a guest on today's "Ships, Sea, and the Stars" which focuses on the coast.
I say "focuses" but it's a pretty holistic episode, taking in everything from where best to see the Northern Lights (an aeroplane with the lights out) to things it's unlucky to say on a boat ("rabbit" is out), and I provide another couple of readings, one a nearly two-centuries-old account of a trip to the seaside by Charles Dickens, for which it was suggested I do a voice, and the other a poem from the Shetlands based on a Viking proverb - Bound Is The Boatless Man - for which it was suggested I didn't:
Noel Fielding ignores George Lucas explaining how to get shot.
"Good luck."
Leia's words to Luke before he swings her across the abyss: simple, benevolent, fearless, sincere and also, I now realise forty years later, such a great power move. "Good luck." My bet is Carrie Fisher improvised that line, and I'm also pretty sure the instant I saw her wish it is the instant Princess Leia became my first love.
No lie! I think it was Margaret Cabourn-Smith who recommended me to the creator of Trying, so thanks Margaret, here's a picture of the fun I had on it. It debuts this month on Apple TV, which is like
normal TV except better funded and a website. According to the Hollywood Reporter "the show is disarmingly original in concept, its eight-episode first
season committed to the grueling true-to-life intricacies of these
proceedings, from applications and home evaluations to training classes
and interview panels." As you can see. I'm in episode 5.
I first saw this video on Talking Heads' VHS compilation Storytelling Giant and I'm pretty sure I stopped sitting out dances soon after. Voluntarily walking onto a dancefloor and moving on the spot had never been something I'd associated with myself before, it seemed too serious and difficult, like sport. I'm not really sure what these dancers were doing that felt so different, but I loved the undercover melodrama of it, the Tex Averish sneakiness, and although I couldn't copy the moves I could happily overact to an improvised internal monlogue in time with some music, which is what I began doing after seeing this, and have been doing ever since. It's choreographed by Toni Basil.
And like Toni, I've still got it.
P.S. Full Shakespeare is still happening, but other than a link in my profile and maybe a weekly round-up I'm going to start letting the blog, youtube and instagram accounts do their own thing a bit more from now on. I'll still plug stuff here, I just don't want to get tunnel vision, and I want to let my eyes dart. So today's video is still uploading, but Sunday's can be watched here (controversially The Taming of the Shrew starts a hole act earlier than Act One). I hope like Ms. Basil you're all using it and not losing it out there.
I notice that the brilliant crappytaxidermy.com hasn't been updated since 2015. But then I only dipped into it now because today's post features Anna Savory's taxidermy sitcom Stuff And Nonsense, which I got to be in thanks to a four-way Squadcast recording whose results turned out considerably better pieced together. Congrats to all respons.
S&N appeared on Friday as part of Robbie Hudson's deft and generous, online, weekdaily reimagining under lockdown of "Tall Tales", a previously every-other-monthly presentation above a pub in Kilburn, hosted by Robbie, of knowingly Radio 4-ish material before a friendly audience (and the first stop for most of John Finnemore's episode-ending "Since You Ask Me"'s). Like crappytaxidermy.com all episodes are worth a visit, but particularly those featuring Robbie's News From Kilburn stories, rich fiction perfectly realised as natter. I'm a Stuff and Nonsense virgin myself, but joining me for the recording were its "Tall Tale" stalwarts: Hugh, Tom, Shim and Anna the author. Tom and Shim you'll know if you came to An Execution: By Invitation Only, and Tom of course I know from - quickly doing the maths - the last thrity-two years of my life wait what?
