I’ve been very comfortable here.
I’m staying in an old farmhouse deep in the Welsh countryside. If I’m not being thoughtful, I brain myself on the door to the loo. There’s a big lump on my head already, compounded by the time I’ve been here. I could not live in this place for that simple reason. It would eventually kill me.
We had a show tonight again. We started at the beginning and finished at the end. The middle was up for grabs largely, but the whole thing was largely sustained by the company.
My character veers from being an insufferable and bloodthirsty piece of shit to being a fun happy festival voice. He’s the bacchanal. No surprise it’s me playing him. Party party party party KILL party. This is a voice I know deeply deeply deeply from work and karma. It’s a big part of the mess of human chaos that oor wullie was interested in. He was on the edge of the oral tradition when he was making plays. His stuff has survived as he wrote it, when just a generation before him there was little chance of that happening.
Oral trad stories are much more likely to be morally difficult. As soon as a left brainer writes it down – and the early clerks will have mostly been the equivalent of our intellectuals now – their preference affects the stories because they aren’t very good at staring into the void. “Let’s make Grandmother still be alive when the woodcutter cuts!”
Merchant of Venice is horrible. It’s incredible. It’s vile. Oral tradition lite though. Most oral stories have no resolution and either kill everyone or destroy hope because they have been built to respond to this arbitrary and hopeless world where the only certainly is the eventual heat death of the universe.
Willy told stories for money, so be avoided such didactic nihilism. He isn’t dumb enough to peddle happy ever after though. He lets everyone speak their fullest and hopes we can think around things and come up with our own conclusions.
Gratiano is the pro capital punishment voice, in the end, in this play. And he starts as the FUN voice. Like so many genuinely dangerous and charismatic humans. “Hey wow, let’s notice things and be opinionated and noisy and let’s believe in God and be in love and angry and actually if I had my way people who don’t think like us should be killed, yeah?” The people with the strongest faiths are universally the most dangerous, as they reckon they’ve got the moral high ground and have outsourced their responsibility. They can do whatever “the thing” is cos *insert higher power* wants it based on their interpretation of *text*. I got pissed off with some American eejit on Twitter recently who said that the rainbow belonged to The Bible. I tried to tell him by how many thousands of years Gilgamesh predated the transcription of myth that he wanted to sell as history. Thankfully it didn’t make me the focus of ignorant rage. You see it so often with these Christian Americans. If it wasn’t Christianity it would be another myth, so I’ve nothing against it in particular. But the scattergun is absurd. I’ve even seen them try and say that Caduceus is to do with Satan as a way of slamming the NHS.
But my father taught me “You can’t argue with stupid”.
My character is that guy. He’s immediate and opinionated and dumb. And lovable. There’s the point though. We can all frame the world however we want. It’s only when we start dismissing those who don’t share our frame that we start to do harm…
AlBarclay 