by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
Not to worry about the 17-year-olds – they are in great shape.
On Friday, November 9, 2018, drama students at New Hampshire’s Concord High School put on “The Complete Works of Shakespeare in 90 Minutes.”
You never saw such jumping around. A hockey game would look tame compared to the physical energy on display on this Elizabethan stage. In fact, the boy who played Juliet (you didn’t think they’d let a girl play Juliet did you?) threw himself on the floor so many times I could see an orthopaedics bill in the offing.
Juliet’s name is Myles Luongo and he had extraordinary self-confidence and ability to interact with the audience.
The “complete works” did not exactly get an airing. Two persons took the responsibility for abridging it: the emcee — Aly Magsipoc — and the “scholar in residence” Daniel Gaby who clearly has a future in theatre, if not Shakespearean scholarship.
Gaby pared the show down to, basically: Titus Andronicus (very bloody, with hints of dismemberment), Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet.
Horatio’s name was pronounced Fellatio, but in the hour and a half there was only a modicum of coarse language. Surprisingly, the show lacked any reference to Twitter (thank God) and it had no political theme, not even a disguised reference to Trump or Mrs Clinton.
The set, by John Hatab, was simple, and really quite impressive. A feature was the holy book (the Book of Bard) which the emcee rolled out on a portable altar when she needed to look up a missing line. Fidelity to the text, however, was almost non-existent. I think I heard a “To be or not to be” in there somewhere, though not necessarily in the Hamlet portion of the show.
So, you may wonder what in fact was the thrust of this performance? I am wondering too. I never stopped laughing. Much of it was slapstick. It seemed improvised but it couldn’t have been, as 6 dancers flitted in frequently from the wings and if they hadn’t had choreographic discipline they would have run into one another.
Props were of suitably ridiculous quality, such as plastic swords. Costumes were a bit haphazard, but enough to give you the feel of the late 16th century. There was a bit of strobe lighting, about which a warning was issued before the curtain rose “for that subset of people for whom strobe lights are an issue.”
Diction was outstanding, except for two of the supporting cast, who had to let their facial expression and body language substitute for any appreciable use of the mother tongue. I have to say that the show could almost have got by with no “legible” words at all – thanks to the fantastic energy of the performers.
Towards the end, they said they’d now do the 154 sonnets of the Bard.
Oh that they had called me to the stage!
I could have troubled heaven with my bootless cries!
I could have shaken the darling buds of May!
I could have been a star to every wandering bark! Etc.
But they did not proceed to the promised sonnets. They invited a boy named Bob from the audience to come up, combed his hair, and asked him to do a primal scream.
Which he did. Bob is definitely Broadway material.
I walked out of the school grounds safe and happy in the knowledge that the new generation can do whatever needs to be done. They just know.
— Mary W Maxwell is the author of Teen Etiquette with Feelings, which quotes from every play in the Shakespearean canon, or your money back
“Hell is Empty and all the Devils are Here” (Tempest Act 1, Scene 2 – Ariel)
William Shakespeare and the New World Order:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/william-shakespeare-and-the-new-world-order-hell-is-empty-and-all-the-devils-are-here/30493
Look, Fish, he even mentions “The delay of law” and “the insolence of office”
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Students, you should check this out. At least the last 7 minutes about Juliet.
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