Act Crack'der?

 Yeah.

 Here are some SPOILERS!!!! for Act Four of Richard the Second, which is posted below... Excitingly, the far better resolution of this new phone means you can really make out the details now, like the unnoticed mote of schmutz beneath my eye for the majority of a scene in which I'm supposed to be staring into a mirror. Maybe Richard can see the speck, and chooses to leave it. Maybe it reads like that. Other innovations include: swapping which hand holds the crown when switching between Richard and Bolingbroke and then working out how to edit this so I don't look like I'm speed-milking a cow; sparing myself seven years of bad luck by simultaneously running, at different speeds, a recording of me tapping a mirror, rather than actually breaking one (that came out alright I think); and having nearly everyone turn Scottish, it seems. The biggest decision, though, has been where to mark the points of injury while tracking the increasingly inevitable – the moments of genuine distress – since there's such a sustained performance of grief from both Richard and the Queen, and they must be enjoying some of it. What's surprising then? What's the worst news? It was watching Mark Rylance at the Globe that I first realised Northumberland is essentially asking Richard to sign his own death warrant, which was useful. As was the BBC's Richard II with Derek Jacobi (not pictured), when I first saw the King's surrender at Flint Castle played as a private aside to Aumerle, rather than howled down to Northumberland, which makes a lot more sense (or is, at least, a lot easier to act). That's what's hard: working out how to make this easy. Nearly there.

"Fred" and Flint

  Oo. I had one of these (a fanned cape, not an Ian Richardson)

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 Before the Globe reopened and this could be tested, it was taught for some reason that open air theatres in Shakespeare's day required a broader and bellowier, more unrealistic performing style to compete I suppose with the visible bustle surrounding the actors, but this theory never considered the possibility it might actually be easier to connect with an audience you can see than one sat in the dark, no matter how hermetically sealed, or that broad daylight might actually require greater realism. Mark Rylance, the Globe's first actor manager in nearly four hundred years, proved this beautifully. He was not a bellower. He mumbled. He even stumbled. I last saw him at the Globe playing Richard the Second as a man who, like Alfred Ill in Dürrenmatt's The Visit, realises long before everyone around him that they're going to have to kill him (The Visit's very good), and he was superb, and there was a flub: As the King's world suddenly collapses around him he feels compelled to admit to his followers "I live with bread, like you" but when Rylance played the scene Richard, apparently in a state of shock, said instead "I live with Fred..." and I still remember that flub seventeen years later, a mistake made completely in character, a sign of craftsmanship. So when I found the speech on youtube yesterday I admit I was surprised to see, three minutes and twenty-eight seconds in, Rylance making exactly the same flub. "I live with Fred..." It's possible I saw him on the same night this was recorded. But it's not likely. What an artisan. Here's me bellowing, and Bolingbroke being a cock...