R3: The King

Well, this is the first installment of the Richard Notebooks, as I call them in my head, and R3, as this serial will be called and tagged as. I've decided I'm going to focus on one particular aspect of the play in each post, lest I start getting lost in analysis and analysis of analysis.

I will be updating on Fridays, and when I'm feeling particularly industrious, Mondays. I have very little else to do on these days.

First, I have been fortunate enough to get my little hands on The Year of the King, a book by the great actor Antony Sher about his preparations for playing Richard the Third. You can expect weekly installments and thoughts as I progress through it.

I've also transcribed a video interview with Peter Hartwell, Miles Potter, and Seana McKenna, respectively the designer, director, and lead in Stratford's latest incarnation of the play. I may or may not be publishing that publicly. I want to ask permission from the Festival before I do that.

I want to talk about Kevin Spacey's latest foray into the role, the planned Mandarin production that will be featuring in the Globe's wonderfully insane staging of a complete and multilingual Shakespearean canon in 2012, and Two Roses For Richard III, an acrobatic Brazilian staging of the play from Companhia Bufomecanica which will be featured elsewhere in the Shakespearean deluge of the Cultural Olympiad.

There's more, but I'm scared my own brain will explode from the sheer immensity of this project I'm undertaking.

Stay tuned!

Full Day

Finished my Classic Civ. exam without too much ado. It was pretty easy, though I definitely struck out on the government section. What can you do.

After that, I went downtown to attend the Tartuffe reading, but not before purchasing volume two of Sandman. More on that tomorrow, when I actually read and retain what's in it.

It was great to see so many people who I'd enjoyed working with before but wasn't able to keep in touch with at the reading. It's so hard to find people passionate about drama who aren't totally obnoxious, but this group is consistently mature and amazing. I look forward to working with them. It was also a thrill to get the RHYMING TRANSLATION once and for all. I can't stop reading it. It's almost as amazing as Sandman.

However, none of these things were quite as exciting as when I arrived and was informed that I now had dual roles. Rather than just playing the Officer, I have been bequeathed the role of M. Loyal. This is great because the actions of M. Loyal are immediately undone by the Officer, not three pages afterward. Best dual casting ever.

When I came home, I checked my e-mail and found a link to this website, which fully announces Shakespeare's Globe's plan to make a multi-lingual multi-cultural Shakespeare fest to coincide with the London Olympics. They plan to do the entirety of Shakespeare's canon, but in all different languages with all different theatre companies. This is brill, totally brill. I'm saving up to get to London as of today.

Lord of the Rings is doing as well as I could expect. I finished chapter two. What happened in a nutshell:

• Years pass, Frodo is well-preserved and eccentric as Bilbo. Presumably the latter is genetic, and the former is the influence of the Ring.
• Gandalf returns after a long absence to inform Frodo that the Ring is evil and should be destroyed immediately. Frodo wonders why Gandalf never comes on a social call.
• Destroying the Ring necessitates that Frodo leave the Shire. He is not pleased, until he is reminded, none-too-gently, that not destroying the Ring means that the Shire will likely be enslaved by the Dark Powers... in a roundabout way.
• To everyone's surprise, Frodo decides to leave, when it is revealed that his gardener Sam Gamgee has been eavesdropping on the entire conversation. The gardener becomes the third of their party. He is inordinately pleased about this.

Characters Introduced:

• Sam Gamgee- Frodo's gardener, who obviously has a bit more tolerance for adventure and eccentricity than other Hobbits.
• Gollum- Mentioned at great length by Gandalf. We learn of how the Ring corrupted him, and the whole sad story of his life.
• Saruman- Again, mentioned by Gandalf. A wizard of great power whose pride grows with his knowledge. Dangerous.

This chapter clipped along nicely. I don't understand why the book is so big, when action is set so quickly. I imagine most of the book's bulk will be due to Tolkien's long idyllic descriptions of people walking...