playing the thing

I was groggy for most of the day yesterday, my innocent sleep having been untimely ripp'd out of the even tenor of its way by a cat licking my hair, as he (this is Tybalt) is ever wont to do.

I managed, however, to get through my fourth video play of the shutdown and the second Shakespeare. Although I enjoy listening to recordings of music while working at the computer, I don't like having full concerts that way. I pay attention at concerts, and I find that difficult at a screen. Plays are much easier to attend to, but they have to be both to my taste - I have no desire, for instance, to watch a currently advertised A Doll's House, Part 2, because I never even liked Part 1 - and well-performed.

The best-performed of the four was the Syracuse Stage production of Amadeus that I reported on two weeks ago. The excellent acting riveted my attention throughout, despite the author having eviscerated the ending in his last revision.

Then I watched the National Theatre Live production of One Man Two Guvnors starring James Corden, which was a little bit too much of a farce even for me. (No longer available.)

Then, on to Shakespeare. I saw that the American Shakespeare Center, of Staunton, Virginia, is selling tickets for online videos of all the plays in their current season, so I picked Much Ado About Nothing. Benedick and Don John were both played by women, but their voices and presentations were such that you'd hardly have guessed. Though there were a few clever bits (the best being the purportedly lame Don John giving a gleeful hop and skip when exiting after succeeding at fooling Claudio and Don Pedro over Hero), I found the performance overall competent but uninspiring. Since that's the same reaction I had when at Staunton in person three years ago for their Romeo and Juliet, I don't think it was an artifact of the video. At times I found myself wishing I was watching the Joss Whedon film version instead, and that's not a reaction I've ever had to Much Ado live on stage.

Lastly, Hamlet from Shakespeare's Globe in London. This also had a lot of cross-casting, much more conspicuous in the performance than with Much Ado. Hamlet was a woman,* who shouted hoarsely throughout the play, for much of it wearing smeared clown makeup for some unfathomable but doubtlessly symbolic reason. The stabbing of Polonius was almost off-handed, and so was forcing Claudius to drink the poison. Horatio and Laertes were also women, the latter so physically small as to be unable to contain the character's fury in Act IV. Rosencrantz seemed over twice Hamlet's age, and Guildenstern spoke only in sign language, though nobody else made more than a token effort to reciprocate. Ophelia was a man, and not a very feminine-looking one either. However, the sight of him in a dress, or of him not trying very hard to depict madness, was not as disconcerting as, hard upon Ophelia's funeral, having this distinctive-looking fellow reappear on stage in the form of Osric. By far the best performance was James Garnon as Claudius, and that's notable, because Claudius is the role in Hamlet most often performed badly. But Garnon's reactions in the early part of the play, and his speeches in the later part, especially the asides, were brilliant and compelling. He was less menacing than exasperated. If you want to watch this, and it's worth it for Claudius, it's still available for free till Sunday on their YouTube channel.

*Michelle Terry, whom I later learned is the theater's artistic director, which explains why there was nobody to tell her that, gender fluidity or not, this was bad casting.