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danieldwilliamMy favourite Shakespeare play is Much Ado About Nothing (or Noting or Love's Labour Won).
It was the first Shakespeare play I was in. I played Leonato, governor of Messina and father of Hero, the wronged herione of the play. The production was staged in a courtyard garden at Aberdeen University. In early summer. I was 20. Given a run up I can probably still perform the opening scene.
A memorable event in the production was the actor playing the Friar forgetting a line. These things happen - but as the line he forgot was his speech at the aborted wedding of Claudio and Hero halfway through the play where he recaps the plot of the first half and lays out the plot of the second half it was quite some line to forget. I launched in to perhaps the greatest piece of improvised dialogue I have produced starting with "What I think the Father is saying to us is..." and summarised the Friar's speech and my own interuptions to is.
Straightaway after to the University library to borrow the largest bible we could lay our hands on and stick a copy of the text to the middle page.
A few years before Kenneth Branagh had released his film version. I love the sunshine of it. And Emma Thomson.
I like the play because I was in it and I have a fondness for things that I've done. It's funny. I also like it because it is a funny but quite serious critique of double standards of sexual morality set on a sunny day in Italy.
It was the first Shakespeare play I was in. I played Leonato, governor of Messina and father of Hero, the wronged herione of the play. The production was staged in a courtyard garden at Aberdeen University. In early summer. I was 20. Given a run up I can probably still perform the opening scene.
A memorable event in the production was the actor playing the Friar forgetting a line. These things happen - but as the line he forgot was his speech at the aborted wedding of Claudio and Hero halfway through the play where he recaps the plot of the first half and lays out the plot of the second half it was quite some line to forget. I launched in to perhaps the greatest piece of improvised dialogue I have produced starting with "What I think the Father is saying to us is..." and summarised the Friar's speech and my own interuptions to is.
Straightaway after to the University library to borrow the largest bible we could lay our hands on and stick a copy of the text to the middle page.
A few years before Kenneth Branagh had released his film version. I love the sunshine of it. And Emma Thomson.
I like the play because I was in it and I have a fondness for things that I've done. It's funny. I also like it because it is a funny but quite serious critique of double standards of sexual morality set on a sunny day in Italy.
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Date: 2016-04-20 08:33 pm (UTC)My favourite play is Twelfth Night. It's the one that's got the most going on. But I also love Hamlet a lot.
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Date: 2016-04-21 07:58 am (UTC)And also cross-gartered.
Hamlet is undoubtedly one of the best plays ever writen. Shakespeare could have finished Hamlet, dropped the quill and walked in to history on the strength of it alone.