Somehow we have finished our first pass of As You Like It. We have now looked at all of it. The whole pile of content.
It’s a lot.
I’m impressed with the five of us. It seems like we genuinely still like each other. There’s no tension, no weirdness. We are a brilliant bunch of nerds.
I’m happy to be a massive Shakespeare and word geek. I’m not the guy who says “well actually I think you’ll find” because my attachment to Willy is mixed up in my assessment that he was coining words, fucking with form, breaking conventions and generally being disobedient. To honour his work is to have mischief and bright life sewn into it. Treat it with excessive reverence and you ossify it. Don’t fuck with the text, sure. Listen to the notes he has given you on rhythm and tone and action. You don’t need to “make it relevant” by putting concept onto it – it is relevant purely by being human and relatable. Find that. Speak the speech trippingly on the tongue. He gave us, through Hamlet, three years of drama school in a speech:
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.”
Trust the text and yourself within it, and each other. The words will do the work so long as they can be heard. You don’t need to chuck them at us larded with false meaning. And honestly the more random shit you do with your hands the harder it is to hear the text. We are vessels. It is on us to embody this stuff, the more we “do” the more we get in the way. Sure yes ego makes us want to be impressive and sometimes that’s good cos it’s fun to watch people in their blood. But… it mustn’t be the only setting or it loses its sting. Be Herod when you’re Herod – it’s gonna be written big and it’s what the people want. But there are many many tools in the toolbox.
This is a very special group. I’m happy to be part of it. But I’m feeling old at the moment. My back is all gippy – still the JC lifting injury. We are in tomorrow and I’m delicate…
AlBarclay 