All You Need To Know About The Two Gentlemen Of Verona

Today the Royal Shakespeare company is live-broadcasting its current production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona! Not familiar with the play? No worries! I've got you covered. 

The comedies always seem so much more complicated than the tragedies, don't they?

If you've seen Shakespeare in Love, you know more about The Two Gentlemen of Verona than you think you do. The bit in the beginning with Queen Elizabeth laughing at the dog on stage? That's Crab, from Two Gents. The "What light is light if Silvia be not seen?" speech that Viola gives at her audition? That's one of Valentine's speeches, from Two Gents. Comedy, love, and a bit with a dog. 

Check here to see when/where the RSC's Two Gents broadcast will be playing near you! 

(Also, my apologies for not posting anything yesterday. I was busy lying on the couch, recovering from a rock-climbing road trip. It turns out it's very hard to get anything done while lying on the couch.)

The 2014 Stratford Festival: The Plays, part 1

In my last post I outlined some of the fun adventures I had at the Stratford Festival this year. Today I'm going to take a closer look at four of the Shakespeare productions I saw, starting with King Lear, starring Colm Feore. 

I am a very technically-focused and analytical theatre-goer, so I very rarely lose myself entirely in a play. This doesn't diminish my enjoyment (in fact, I think it enhances it) but it does mean I am rarely moved to tears by what I see on stage. And I'm not going to go so far as to say Feore's Lear made me cry, but there was definitely something in the air that made my eyes a bit itchy.

If I am slow to cry, I am quick to laugh, especially when an actor finds humor in a line or situation that I otherwise would never have considered humorous. The cast of King John, especially Graham Abbey's wry and swaggering Bastard, managed to unearth every latent laugh in what, on the surface anyways, appears to be a somewhat dour history play. I enjoyed myself tremendously, much more than I had anticipated. 

The joy of going to a repertory company like the Stratford Festival for numerous years is that you see each actor in numerous different roles, and become familiar with different facets of their talent and stage presence. One of things that has always enamored Geraint Wyn Davies to me is his propensity to utilize his native Welsh accent. (As a proud, if somewhat diluted 1/32nd Welsh patriot, I am particularly susceptible to Welsh accents.) I hasten to point out that Mr. Wyn Davies's excellent Antony showed few signs of hailing from across the Severn... but I kind of wish he had. 

Director Chris Abraham's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream could have been expressly designed to push every single button possessed by Shakespearean purists. It plays with the text, adding lines to establish a framing device setting the play as an entertainment put on to celebrate the wedding of a gay couple. Lysander is played by a woman and as a woman, making Hermia's father's objection to his daughter's marriage a comment on marriage equality. Titania is played as a woman, but by one of two rather muscular men.

There are cell phones, pop songs, food fights, sight gags, and an on-stage pond that numerous people fall into. It's cluttered and overwhelming and OH MY GOODNESS IT IS SO MUCH FUN. I have never been a particular fan of A Midsummer Night's Dream, apart from the Pyramus and Thisbe bit, but this production instantly won a place in my heart. It is so full of joy, so full of fun, and is such an open celebration of love that, appropriately enough, I fell in love with it.

If you want "traditional" Shakespeare (whatever that might be), this is probably not the production for you. But if you want A LOT OF PURE, UNADULTERATED FUN wrapped up in a Shakespeare-shaped package, I can't think of a better thing to do than to see this show. 

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Is that enough gushing for now? Check back on Friday when I'll take a look at some of the non-Shakespearean productions. Also, take a look at my other Stratford Festival comics! 

A Valid Question

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"What about going home? Going home sounds like a feasible option."

'I'm spending most of next week at the Stratford Festival. In order to decompress (as well as get caught up on several massively overdue projects - I'm hoping the two are not mutually incompatible), I will not be posting new comics here next week. However, I'm planning on uploading random sketches and observations to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, so if you're not following me on one or the other already, this is a good time to do so. 

Have a good week! I'll be back on August 25th, simultaneously recharged by a week of excellent theatre and disconsolate that it is over. 

A Mid-Burmese-Lesson's Dream

Two years ago I took a summer course in Burmese language at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute in Wisconsin. It was great, but in the intervening two years my fledgling Burmese skills have deteriorated sharply, due to me not keeping up with my studies and having no one else to talk to in Burmese. So I decided to give myself a quick refresher by listening to Burmese By Ear, an audio course covering all the conversational basics. Everything was fine until we got to Unit Ten. 

Now, given how many of my waking hours are spent thinking about Shakespeare, it's not unheard of for me to hear Shakespearean references where there are none. However, this time it wasn't me. This entire section featured Demetrius, Hermia, Helena and Lysander very politely asking each other what their names were. It was surreal.

And then, of course, I got so distracted by this that I had to listen to the lesson over again, because I wasn't paying attention: I was imagining A Midsummer Night's Dream set in Burma and trying to decide if Bottom would remain an ass or if a water buffalo head would be more appropriate. (Final verdict: he would remain an ass, so as not to infringe on the Bago Nat's territory.)

Ira Glass and the History of Shakespearean Criticism

So, as everyone knows, earlier this week NPR radio star Ira Glass ignited a firestorm by daring to voice his opinion about Shakespeare, writing the following tweets:

Unsurprisingly, the pro-Shakespeare crowd has been having a field day with this. As the world's leading (i.e. probably the world's the only) Shakesperean webcomic blogger, I feel obliged to address the matter. So here...

It's like chocolate. Some people don't like chocolate - I think they're crazy, and they don't know what they're missing, but I'm certainly not going to argue with them about it. It's a personal thing. People have been busy disliking Shakespeare for centuries, but Shakespeare is still here. And so is chocolate. I happen to think the world is a better place because both of those things exist, but people are free to disagree with me. 

Basically, my only quarrel with Mr. Glass is the utterly pedestrian terms he uses to attack Shakespeare. "Shakespeare sucks" is such a bland and banal statement when compared to George Bernard Shaw's devastating "it would positively be a relief to me to dig [Shakespeare] up and throw stones at him." If you're going to criticize Shakespeare, do it emphatically and with some flair. 

Blackout

So, I was planning to do a witty piece commenting on the entertaining "Ira Glass thinks Shakespeare sucks" kerfuffle that has been raging across Shakespearean social media accounts, but then the electricity at my house went out. So you have this instead:

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In case you're wondering what other Shakespearean quotes work well during power outages, I can also recommend shrieking "Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!" Just be forewarned - this tends to alarm people. 

The Ladies of Angiers, part 3

After spending Monday and Wednesday with the irrepressible Ladies of Angiers, I am sad to finally be saying farewell to them. They don't care. They're too busy boozing it up. 

Well, when we last left the Ladies, they had just fended off yet another attempt by John and Philip to strongarm them into declaring an allegiance...

OK, so somewhere along the way I totally abandoned the actual plot of King John, but never mind. This it how it should have ended. Everyone's much happier this way. Don't argue. 

Thanks to Brigit Wilson, Carmen Grant, and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings for letting me co-opt their Elizabethan alter-egos for a week!