To be........

In the long gap between posts several different events have inflicted themselves upon me-sometimes due to my own actions, sometimes not. While I will be besmearing the face of this blog with some of those unfortunate incidents, what currrently occupies my attention is the Curious Case of the School Play I find myself entangled in.

Some background: Every year my school gets some unfortunate, unsuspecting theatre director/actor/general hangaround to take complete charge of 50-60 spoilt schoolkids and create a play at which parents can gape and say: Awwwwwwwwwww my little chumplebump is grown so biiiiiiiiiiig!!!!; the friends of the cast can laugh into their knuckles and forever achieve the ability to burst into hysterics when they hear "Alice" or "Batuslovakia"; the cast can get together and remember incidents to keep other disliked people out of the discussion; and finally, so that the school can trade in its cash register for some other device with a more powerful tallying function which can calculate the grossly high profits it makes out of each performance.

There are, however, some noble souls who take part in this event purely to enjoy acting and the feeling of being on stage, loved by the audience, admired by theie peers, and considered the only person on stage who is worth wasting the enormous amounts of money paid for an otherwise abysmal show.

*cough*

*cough*

*Implying nothing about the writer of this blog*

*cough*

Anyway, this year an enterprising woman (her name is Roo) who has undergone theatre training and voice modulation classes (just so loud........) and her tall, silent Scots husband (Liam) who has a light Afrikaans inflection. Despite myself, I can't help but imagine them together as some indomitable Shakespearean couple(currently, I am inclined towards Katherina and Petruchio).

The reason I reference the Great Bard (for truly great performances click here) is that they have selected parts of 6 plays which will be performed by our very own kids. Yes, Excerpts from Shakespeare, just like Highlights from Hamlet.

My glorious performance during the audition apparently merited a role as Antonio, the homosexually suppressed two-faced hypocritical bigot who borrows money from Shylock in Merchant Of Venice.

While I'm not extremely unhappy about this role, few lines as there are to it, I would have greatly preferred that of Shylock. Or any other marginally central character from the plays being performed (Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, The Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and mine own play, Merchant Of Venice). That, however, is not my main complaint.

My main complaint is this: why was the role of Shylock given to fat bawa who had vaguely Jewish features and an astounding inability to either act or enunciate languages apart from a nasally accented Gujurati, instead of me or any other person halfway capable of portraying a miser who shows humanity?

There is, of course, nothing personal in this question; I am simply concerned with the general welfare of the play. Side effects may include a completely rational desire for acquiring a role more deserving of what the user feels is the latent talent within him

To sum up my attitude to today's Let's Begin By Learning How To Speak Verse/Poetry rehearsal, nigel molesworth doth say:

peotry is sissy stuff