"Yet I'll hammer it out."

Mardy cast call, 1995. I'm the top row, slunk third from left, and between me and 
Tom Lyall is Jamie "Apollo" Bamber who played my dad.
 

 Here is the final act of the first run of Richard the Second. Below, not above. As I'm going to be doing the play all over again I won't say much about Act Five this time round, except that I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Having a proper argument to perform, like that between York and the Duchess, is much easier to get a handle on, as are soliloquies that are actually spoken alone. Richard's talk of populating his cell with imaginary kings and beggars tempted me to perform King Lear next, packed as it is with absurdly shifting personalities and brutal fortunes and written, according to the convenional wisdom, in plague-occasioned isolation. But that would be giving up. I'll stick with the Histories. One detail: I was going to let the viewer choose what music Richard heard, as I'd done with previous musical cues, but he mentions it going a little out of time so I decided to insert the track myself so I could have a bit of a fiddle with it. It's iMovie's "Fifth Avenue Stroll" and I chose it for its simple instrumentation, and its associations with the eternally intered employees of Lightning Fast VCR Repair. Thank you to everyone who's seen this through with me.

 And here is the whole first run, if you fancy it. I'm definitely pleased with bits. I'm by no means disowning it, just interested to see what it will be like with less screaming...

 Oh and here's me rattling the cup for millionaires...