Who Thinks We've Started?

... 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 with this one, not so much because it was famous, but because it 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, and yet this is one of the few plays of Shakespeare's which is 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. 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 to 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: