English Coursework Afterthoughts.

'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools /  The way to dusty death.' (5.v.18)

I think that passage of Macbeth's soliloquy roughly sums up the mindset on the final stretch of perfecting a 1,500 word essay comparing 'Macbeth' and 'Pulp Fiction'. Between 3 hour 'Wuthering Heights' rehearsals and all day Sunday 'The Hero That Panto Deserves' rehearsals and assignments for my other subjects, staying up til midnight checking whether this word is an adverb or in this instance (and this instance alone, apparently) perhaps a pronoun, if this clause could be counted as an interrogative even though its in the middle of a complex sentence, checking this line reference actually corresponds to the quote and painstakingly checking the 70:30 'Macbeth':'Pulp Fiction' ratio.

'Institute' - Play review

Last year at roughly this time I went on a school (college…) trip that completely changed my opinion of physical theatre. I am a Drama student, but policy is at Peter Symonds that students can go on trips of other subjects/departments if it isn't filled up by students from its subject. When offered if I wanted to go with the Performance Studies crowd to go and see Gecko's 'Missing' I though "why not?", it was a chance to see another play and broaden my experience and I knew some of the people going so it was a fun thing to do as a group. If my memory were that sharp I would write a review entirely dedicated to last year's 'Missing', but it isn't. A few details I remember were that no two characters spoke the same language, there was excellent use of puppetry and there was an excellent use of lighting effects - and of course, physical acting. But what I took away from the whole experience, though I can't remember individual details after this much time, was 'holy crap'.

Gecko's performances are like a very special type of drug, the experience of the high itself may fade, but the memory of the feeling lasts and makes you want more.

'Frankenstein' - Play review

I'm putting this under the heading of 'Play review' even though I saw it at my local cinema as I can't really classify it as a film review. This was a National Theatre Live production, which made another rounds of the cinema because everybody was so wowed by it the first time, and now catching it just before it closes for the last time I can definitely see why.

Directed by Danny Boyle, the National Theatre's 'Frankenstein' was originally staged in 2011 and (as a brief introductory documentary told us) starred both Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller as both the titular Victor Frankenstein and his Creature. In that, one night Cumberbatch played Frankenstein and Miller would play the Creature, and then the next Miller would play Frankenstein and Cumberbatch would play the Creature.

'Macbeth' vs. 'Pulp Fiction'

Well aren't you glad I put the inverted commas around 'Macbeth' there. Could you imagine "Macbeth vs. 'Pulp Fiction'"? I'm not entirely sure how it'd work - maybe Butch (Macbeth) is Marsellus's (Duncan) prize fighter, and after killing Vince (the old Thane of Cawdor) he realises he can overthrow Marsellus - maybe it wouldn't work, that was a silly idea. Anyway, at least I can pick out some similarities, if a little tenuous, as  my task over this half-term is to write an epic piece of coursework. It is a 1,500 word essay, equivalent to 10% of my entire A-level (insert terrified emoji here), based on a question of our composition.

Originally I was going to come up with something quite long and convoluted like exploring the paranoia, the lengths people will go to in order to achieve power and then the lengths in order to maintain it, as paranoia is a theme in 'Macbeth' which really interests me, and it's sort of applicable to 'Pulp Fiction'.

'Othello' - Play review

I was intending to watch those 4 'Othello' DVDs from the library all before I watched the show (I'm currently halfway through the third) but extenuating circumstances occurred, and I was fairly sure after watching the first one I knew the story anyway. I've seen Frantic Assembly once before, I saw their 'Beautiful Burnout' at the Nuffield 3 years ago for my drama GCSE and that just totally blew me away. Since then I started acting myself, and my director at the Nuffield Youth Theatre, Max Lindsay, is always saying how he got such and such an exercise from Frantic, or something drew an influence from them. At Hampshire Youth Theatre we even had a workshop with them for 'Great Expectations'.

So since starting acting myself and being involved in a lot of Frantic-inspired stuff I haven't actually seen a Frantic show, and what with me trying to watch as many Shakespeare films as possible before going to drama school, and what with the £5 tickets for Nuffield YT members, Frantic's 'Othello' was the perfect chance to see something awesome and personally significant.

And god daaaaaaaaaaaaamn that is how you do Shakespeare my friends, that is how you do Shakespeare.

If you want a bit of background if you haven't seen it already, it's been modernised to a bar/pub in northern England… On the Isle of Wight we'd call the society 'chavs', but I've got out of the habit of using that pathetic word thankfully. I just mean it's set in a violent, patriarchal hyper-sexualised microcosm (in which they all happen to wear nike hoodies, sweatpants and trainers) in which one's violence is what establishes and maintains one's status. These microcosms exist in contemporary society but it's perfectly possible to translate this story of violence, jealousy and revenge into one as they are separate from the values of the rest of society. And the translation is perfect: the words are all the same but the inflection and context give them different meaning - the 'Turks' are a rival gang coming to attack 'the Cypress', the pub in which the play is set, and Othello's 'lieutenant' is a trusted friend, etc., etc.

'1984' - Play review

Just as a warning I've seen this play once before already and worked a lot out about it, so there will be definite spoilers. Careful reading if you haven't seen it, I want to mention everything about how awesome it was.

Last year for my Drama and Theatre Studies AS I was fortunate enough to go on a trip to Salisbury to watch Headlong's '1984' in the Salisbury Playhouse. I ended up writing about it in my 'Live productions scene' exam and got an A for drama overall. So you can understand my excitement when, almost exactly a year later, I learn that Headlong are bringing back their '1984' and to my local Nuffield Theatre.

There's something to be said for saying the play more than once. If it's just the same script done by different companies that can be helpful, as I'm learning from my watching of all the Shakespeare films I can get my hands on, for seeing the various ways the text can be interpreted, and through that odd form of cross-examination getting closer to what the original writer may have been trying to say.

But watching the exact same show is something quite different entirely, especially with the long time difference.

'Three Men in a Boat' - Play review

I'm a part of the Nuffield Youth Theatre, and one of the peers of being thus is that I can get £5 tickets to most shows which come to the Nuffield. This time, as with 'The Events', my director stressed how good this play is, so I went along to see what it's all about. (Just for the record I also have tickets to go and see 'Othello' and '1984')

Normally I don't think I'd really choose to watch a comedy. From my experience, I much prefer tragedies, horror, war, things with a sad ending, or at least where characters have to face up to serious adversity. Much of my new experience watching Shakespeare's plays is changing my opinion of comedies and happy plays, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm not much of a laugher. I'm sure a normal person would have 'been in stitches', but I laughed more than I normally do.

If you don't know 'Three Men in a Boat' (I know I sat down in the theatre knowing nothing about it), it's set in a pub, and it's three London gentlemen humorously telling the humorous story of their holiday on the Thames. The three main actors had excellent comedic synergy between them, and because it was a something of a play-within-a-play whenever they made a mistake in telling the story they could make it part of the joke that the main characters aren't very good at telling their story.

'The Events' - Play review

The Nuffield Theatre in Southampton is my 'home' theatre. I come from the Isle of Wight, but I've been going there to see plays since I first had an interest in theatre, and I have never been disappointed with what I've seen there. It's such an amazing theatre which always seems to attract such astounding shows - so when I heard there was a lot of fervour about 'The Events', which had won the Guardian's 'Best Theatre of 2013' and was coming to the Nuffield, I knew I had to see it.
I felt emotionally challenged by it. The play uses a different local choir in every night of the show, so the cast of two are greatly outnumbered by people who aren't actors but are encouraged by the script to take an active role in the action. This strange fusion of 'unpolished' and 'appropriate' just made the events more raw - this is a play about real, ordinary people. People who aren't actors, who don't know how to stand up on a stage in front of 70 people anymore than they would know what to do if a white extremist walked into their choir rehearsal with a gun. You are watching people who have been taken out of their normal routine and made to do something they aren't suited to - the Nuffield Fringe Choir being made to participate in the dialogue on stage are like the actual choir in the story being encouraged to talk about the horror they'd witnessed.
A particular moment of this which stood out to me, and still stands out to me the day after, is a man coming out of the choir with his script to tell Claire that he doesn't want to do the choir anymore. To you and me, he is anonymous. I have never seen him before, he is a shy man whose name I will never know - he is, to me, a nobody. And yet here he is centre stage, Claire has just collapsed with grief, he picks up his script and leaves the choir and suddenly he is part of this action, with a little microphone. In a quiet expressionless voice, a voice which sounded to me like it was genuinely reading the words on the page for the first time in his life, 'Claire, we don't want to do choir anymore'. A pause. 'It isn't fun'. Another pause. 'It's depressing. We like singing pop songs… and hymns.'
I know I should probably be talking about the actors in this review, but to me it was the choir of non-actors whose presence affected me the most.
Speaking of the choir, the music was beautiful. I think everyone in the audience was surprised when a play about a mass shooting started with a jolly choral rendition of 'Do You Hear The People Sing' from Les Mis, but it was lovely. I hugely admire Magnus Gilljam, listed in the programme as the 'pianist' - I assume he also wrote the music arrangements. He was never present in the action, more he conduct the choir into the events. The beautiful simplicity of the music and the playful piano parts jarred against the horror of the events, I imagine it as some metaphor for how the music was supposed to bring them together. I was always aware of Gilljam, half of my mind or the corner of my eye kept watching him though the action, how through a very fraud and emotional scene he would calmly gesture to the choir to stand or sit or hum or sing and mouth along with them to keep them in time together. I don't know why, but I kind of imagined him as music itself. An image which was shattered by his modest shrug in the bows, but a beautiful image while it lasted.

Before 'The Events' started. Those stairs are where the choir spent most of their time sat, and the piano got swivelled round 90 degrees anticlockwise to face the opposite side of the stage.

Derbhle Crotty played the main character, Claire, the leader of a multicultural choir group at a community centre on the side of a community centre. An unknown time ago, a crazed boy, a white supremacist, practised an ancient Viking ritual used to turn oneself into a berserker, got a gun and walked into the choir, shooting people to the very last bullet (which, it turns out, was almost for Claire). She did an excellent job of playing Claire, portraying not the emotions I would have expected from a victim of such trauma, but which seemed so very real given the circumstances.
The acting from Clifford Samuel ('The Boy' in the programme) was astounding. He seemed to truly transcend any singular aspects of class, gender, sex or race. He would just be going through a scene and I wouldn't be entirely aware of who he was, and then Claire would mention his name and I'd review everything I'd just seen and think 'oh of course he's a woman', 'oh of course he's a white supremacist'. He must have played at least 10 different characters, incredibly subtly, but as soon as I was aware of who he was supposed to be playing I got it from him straight away. My favourite scene of everything which involved Clifford Samuel and Derbhle Crotty was Claire's attempted suicide. The scene changed and I had no idea where we were. Samuel played an anonymous stranger talking to her nicely about how nice the view is, asking for her name and if he can hold her hand. Only when he grips her by the forearm instead and leans his body weight away from her did I realise we're on the edge of the cliff - and 'oh of course we're on the edge of a cliff'.
I think the most effective/affective/soul-destroying element of 'The Events' was that, it never was so lazy as to blurt things in your face, everything was a slow realisation. A slow realisation which suddenly kicks you in the gut.
A bit odd in a review about a play such as this to talk about the lighting, especially since I'm an actor and don't know two shits about lighting, but something about the lighting is it was never definite when we left the theatre and moved to the play and when we came back again. The house lights were all still up when the choir came on stage and never went out, just faded out slow through the first few scenes. At first these are two actors on stage and this is a choir from Southampton, and I don't know at which point I was suddenly very sure that this was no longer a choir of people I knew but a choir from a totally different place. Again, at the end, in the last rehearsal of the choir I became aware of the houselights coming up, and when Crotty came out of character to congratulate the Southampton Fringe Choir we were back in Southampton. But did we leave? If so, when, and when did we come back?
The transcendence of this play are what made it so phenomenal to me. The shooter was never named, not the politician, the town where it happened, even the country. 'The Events' could have happened absolutely anywhere and it seemed to have happened right in the Nuffield Theatre, right in front of my eyes. I'm giving this play a 9/10.

Summer Plans

You, anonymous internet reader, may or may not have realised that I haven't posted any reviews of films from my college's library in the last few days. That'll be because I really rather stupidly didn't realise something about my college's library: not being able to access it when college is closed (i.e. in the summer holidays, now).

However! I do have something else to watch over the summer - that being my recently expanded collection of Doctor Who DVDs!

I've had season 1 and 2 since about January I think, and watched them all, but season 3 and 4 and the Specials I got after building a computer for my Dad with my brother (aren't we smart). I figured with this mini-project a few handy things:
- I got them all in Italian with Italian audio and Italian subtitles. There isn't much Italian I can absorb when I'm not at college so this is perfect and should keep my language-brain going over the time off. (unfortunately I won't be able to include quote in reviews)
- Doctor Who is still drama and acting so I can still write reviews of it - not sure if I'll do each episode or as seasons (probably the former) but there's still content I can create for UABP.
-I FREAKING LOVE DOCTOR WHO. If you don't know me personally you may not understand that but, ahem, it is something of a passion of mine.

'Shards'

When somebody sends you a song,

They send you a shard of their soul.

They tell you:

Which sounds set their scalp ablaze

Or makes their fingertips cold

They tell you:

A direction their heart wants to take

A problem that they need to solve

They tell you:

A sense of a world they want back

Until a chord is resolved

But then ask:

Is it musical Poetry that heals the heart

Or the beautiful nature of Noise?