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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar: Storyhouse 3rd August 2017

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Reviews

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Tags

Chester, Julius Caesar, Storyhouse, theatre, Trump, US President, William Shakespeare


Given the current political climate, it seems to be the thing these days for a theatre company to reinterpret Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with a very Trump like figure in the title role. In the US this has even led to anything with the name Shakespeare associated with it getting death threats from Trump supporters. For some reason they did not like the image of a Trump like figure being brutally assassinated on stage. Even though the play is not at all about glorifying or condoning assassination as a method of political protest. The Grosvenor Park open air theatre for Storyhouse's Julius Caesar

With the above in mind, I headed off to the Storyhouse open air theatre in Chester to see their interpretation of the Roman epic history play.

I do have one thing to admit before I continue, however. Something which may lose me Shakespeare cred points or something. This was the first time I had ever seen Julius Caesar…

I mean, I am not a total newbie to the Bard. I’m familiar with several of his plays, having seen them performed by a number of companies including the Storyhouse troupe. However, way back in school we were offered as a class a choice between three plays – Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. Naturally, being teenagers, we voted overwhelmingly for bloody violence and so romance and political coups passed us by. Since then, I’ve always naturally gravitated to the more fantastical based stories than what were perceived as the serious histories. I’ve preferred not only Macbeth, with its witches and concepts of predestination, but also Midsummer Nights Dream with its faeries and the Tempest with its spirits and magicians, all precursors of modern fantasy and tapping into ancient myths and legends. Julius Caesar was something I never really felt the need to see.

So I arrived at the open air ‘theatre in the round’ in Grosvenor Park in Chester not really knowing what to expect save a passing knowledge of classical history, several viewings of HBO’s Rome with it’s bastardised version of events and the absolute certain knowledge that at some point in the play Caesar gets stabbed repeatedly in the forum.

Oh, and that the chances were they would be Trumping up Caesar.

Which seemed to be the case as the opening scenes of jubilant citizens were replete with ‘Make Rome Great Again’ placards and the set dressing had a certain ‘stars and stripes’ feel to them. However, there the comparisons to the current US president disappear. Despite superficial details, this Caesar is modelled more on the lines of a generic US president than any specific one – no orange faced caricature here. Instead we get a charismatic, grey haired, white man who plays the crowd by literally walking through the crowd shaking hands with the audience, his trophy wife in tow and a gaggle of aides and bodyguards on all sides. An elder statesman at the height of his power. His dialogue and actions are all as Shakespeare wrote them. of course, and the performance of the actor (Christopher Wright) who plays him works well to give the impression of a popular but controversial figure without devolving into petty parody. This is in a marked contrast to the reports of the controversial New York portrayal which had the actor dressed and acting more like the current incumbent and there were dialogue references to ‘5th Avenue’.

In fact, a more notable sign of this play being interpreted for the modern day is in some of the other casting. Several characters, including the pivotal role of Mark Anthony (played by Natalie Grady), have been gender flipped here. This is a good, positive move for a 21st century production, especially as not only is the character who gets the (in)famous and most identifiable ‘lend me your ears’ speech a woman but so is Cinna (one of the conspirators) and Lucius (Brutus’s servant). None of these character has significant changes to their personality or actions as a result of this change, apart from the point where Mark Anthony and Octavius seal their alliance against Brutus and the conspirators with a kiss*. This creates several strong and interesting female characters in a play where traditionally most of the main characters are male and female characters limited to relatively secondary roles without seeming to water down the roles at all. Cinna is still keen to commit the assassination and Mark Anthony is still as keen and ruthless in avenging it.

The modern touches are see throughout. Casca, for example, at one point dresses in a trenchcoat and looks like an aged CIA or FBI agent which is a nice touch and the various ‘rude mechanicals’ are dressed in clothes that can only be described as ‘chav’ and carry cans of lager as they are being obnoxious at the main players. During the riot scenes, several can be seen carrying the box for a flatscreen TV and other consumer goods in a clear nod to the way every single riot in The Simpsons seems to end in looting. Most of the main characters, being patricians, are of course well dressed in smart suits, though they do change to modern military garb later.

The plot moves through the first act with the conspiracy and the seduction of Brutus, ending the first act with the well known ‘et tu Bruti’ line and much blood spilled. The second act explores the aftermath, with the war between Brutus and Mark Anthony triggered by Anthony’s provocative speech to the plebians (which makes good use of actors planted in the audience for a more immersive feel). Of course, followers of history (or watchers of HBO’s Rome) know how that ends for all involved…

Overall, this is a well performed piece of theatre. Immersive without being too much ‘in your face’ and making good use of popular, modern references without breaking the essential nature of the original play. The parts are all well played with strong performances from all. An entertaining evening that has definitely changed my mind about Shakespeare’s more historic stories.

*Would be interesting to know if the director would have included that touch if both characters had been male or both female.

Irony in Fantasy #MancsterCon

13 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

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clichés, Dwarves, elves, Fantasy, Gary Gygax, Magician, MancsterCon, Quattrofoto, Ravenchilde Illustrations, Raymond E Feist, Realm Fantasy Wargame, Terry Pratchett, tropes, William Shakespeare, Wizards


So, on the 29th August MancsterCon will be upon us and that will see myself and a few other authors sitting on a panel discussing fantasy. Specifically fantasy tropes and clichés.

Sparkles!

Sparkles!

Now, fantasy is ripe with lots of juicy cliché. In fact, the years PT (Post Tolkien, a dark time which encompasses most of the 70s and 80s) were filled with trilogy after endless trilogy in which elves lived in forests, dwarves lived in mountainous mines and there was a need for a quest to go somewhere dangerous and do something with a rare artefact that would save the world. Even some of the most well respected authors were prone to these tropes. Raymond E Feist’s Magician, for example, is one of my favourite books from my childhood and one I can still stand to read today. It had some very innovative ideas for the time about magic and many other wonderful concepts. However, in my opinion the presence of elves and dwarves in the world building, particularly ones so close to the Tolkien ideas,  was not one of them. It was almost as if they were put in there because the publisher demanded it or because the author did not think a book without elves and dwarves would sell. I feel that a lot of fantasy in the 70s and 80s suffered from this very assumption. You had to have dwarves and elves and wizards to be fantasy. It was only in the mid to late 90s I feel the Tolkien effect began to wear off and popular fantasy veered away from many of the tropes he established.

Elves and Dwarves as portrayed  by Ravenchilde Illustrations

Elves and Dwarves as portrayed by Ravenchilde Illustrations

Partly to blame may be Gary Gygax who used a lot of the Tolkien ideas in D&D and later AD&D and as they turned into major concerns, many other Roleplaying games and Wargames fed from them.  There wasn’t even really much of an attempt to make things hugely different and this I think led to things spiralling to the point where it was expected that RPGs/Wargames had these concepts because they were in novels and novels had them in because they were in RPGs/Wargames and it kept on ad infinitum. When Serious Lemon asked me to write the background for the wargame Realm, I was basically given the brief to maintain the ‘standard races all fantasy fans expect’ but to try to make them different to the usual tropes. Not sure how well I managed that, though I was particularly proud of my fascist (and actually quite evil in an ‘it’s all for the greater good’ way) Roman elves and the ‘British’ Navy Halflings turned pirate following the destruction of their island kingdom by Cthulhu. However, the point is that the ‘received wisdom’ seems to be that the readers/players expect to see the old favourites and you cannot change them too much lest you alienate your target audience. This risk averse attitude, something which Hollywood is also accused of having, might lead to effective sales (sometimes) but also might stifle creativity. I guess finding the balance between those two points may well be a kwy to success – different enough to be seen as original but with enough familiarity to keep your audience in their comfort zone.

Terry Pratchett, of course, thrived on cliché. His Discworld stories are full of tropes and the subversion of those tropes and he managed to walk that creative tightrope very well. One of my favourites is Cohen the Barbarian, the octogenarian Barbarian hero who first appeared in The Light Fantastic, and his infamous Silver Horde, who debuted in Interesting Times. They manage to be both a subversion of a cliché and a cliché in themselves. On the one hand they subvert the Arnold Schwarzenegger school of barbarianism, which creates a wonderful piece of cognitive dissonance as you imagine a wiry old man swinging a sword far too big for him while wearing a loincloth and little else. On the other hand, they are also everything you come to expect from clichéd old men, including complaints about aches and pains and always having peppermints. Not to mention the wheelchair with blades on the wheels. A lot of layers there.

Pratchett’s treatment of elves and dwarves also shows these two approaches. His elves (as seen in Lords and Ladies) are a subversion as they appear on the surface to be typical Shakespearean fey as seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream because of the effect of their glamour. However, they are actually completely emotionless sociopaths who enjoy tormenting and killing just for the fun of it. On the other hand his dwarves are an exaggeration of all the things you come to expect from them – including (at least in the animated versions) comedy regional accents for all the regions in the UK known for mining (Yorkshire, Wales and the North East). They mine, they talk about mining, they sing about gold (at one point they even sing the Hi Ho song, yes that one…) and they get into fights when drunk*. Oh and they get sensitive about their height. Pratchett’s use of cliché is, I feel, a successful one. He uses the expectations of his audience, lulls them into a false sense of familiarity, then bludgeons them on the back of the neck with the half brick in a sock that is the unexpected subversion of that cliché. This is one way to use cliché and a way I have talked about in the past.

Happily I think we are in a better place creatively than we used to be. It now seems possible to write a whole fantasy trilogy in which there are no pointy eared wood dwelling elves, no bearded mining dwarfs and no long bearded wizards. You can even have a whole long series of books in which the races are based on insects which has to be a step forward. Dwarves in fantasy now have to be the scarred and bitter dispossessed sons of cruel noblemen who have developed a clever wit as a defence against all the taunts they have endured in their life because GRR Martin is now this century’s JRR Tolkien. I am sure we can expect there to be many copies of the concepts in A Song of Ice and Fire in the future. The stagnation that had been in place throughout the PT years is no more, though I suspect we are now entering the PM (post Martin) period… Though personally I would like to see the advent of the PP (Post Pratchett) period.

So, this is written with the intent of starting a debate. I am looking for ideas and concepts to discuss at the panel… If you have a thought on clichés in fantasy, please comment below. Alternatively, please vote on one of the polls I am posting to facebook or contact me in another manner to voice your opinion…

*Well, most of them do… in Wyrd Sisters there is the playwright Hwel, portrayed with a solid West Midland’s accent in the animated version to accentuate the relationship to Shakespeare, who is a non-bearded creative dwarf who has no interest in normal dwarf pursuits.
Some of the images used here were created by Ravenchilde illustrations and Quattrofoto. Please thank them for their efforts by visiting their sites.

D.A Lascelles is the author of Lurking Miscellany, Transitions (Mundania Press) and Gods of the Sea (Pulp Empires). He lives in Manchester UK. You can sometimes see him writing about Zombie porn on https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ but he mostly blogs about books, vampires, science fiction and Terry Pratchett. He is inordinately proud of the fact that one of his Pratchett articles was referenced on the French version of the author’s Wikipedia page.

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April the 23rd…

23 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings

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Tags

April 23rd, dragon slaying, fantasy story, gaming, george s day, love potions, patron saint of england, St George, William Shakespeare, ZX Spectrum


You wait ages for a special day and suddenly 3 turn up at once… April the 23rd is cramming a lot of things into it’s busy schedule today.

First of all we have St George’s day, that celebration of a Palestinian who is known (according to the tale) for making an endangered species even more endangered by killing a dragon. Had he lived long enough he would probably have set his sights on the unicorn… Still, the whole dragon slaying thing did give him a lot of kudos and it is one of the more interesting Saint’s tales I remember from school, even though it almost certainly never happened. Despite being the patron saint of England (and I have never understood why…) his day has yet to be named a bank holiday. This is probably because the government does not want to ally themselves with the somewhat nationalistic views of some of the pro St George brigade, which is understandable. Still, it would be nice to have the same number of Bank holidays as they have in Ireland and there they at least celebrate the day of a man who brought religion to their country (by getting very very drunk).

Next up, there is Shakespeare… Old Bill was (allegedly) born on this day in 1564. I don’t think it need to be stated how much of an influence he had on writing. Whether you enjoy his plays or sonnets or not (and I suspect most of the nots have had a bad experience with him in school that has coloured their opinion, much like the issues I have with Thomas Hardy…) it cannot be denied that Shakespeare did a lot for the world of literature. Many of what we now call cliches in plot and character had their roots or were popularised by him. Therefore, I think April 23rd is worth celebrating for that alone. I’ve always been a fan; ever since realising that many of his stories such as MacBeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest contain many of the elements that make a good fantasy story. Witches, wizards, curses, spirits, love potions, faeries and bloody kings. Even today some of the ways in which Shakespeare handled those elements are apparent in the work of Tolkien and G.R.R Martin and every author who follows them.

It is somewhat disappointing that Google did not see fit to acknowledge this on their homepage, but I suppose they had a lot of special days to choose from…

Finally, it is also apparently the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum, which Google (being geeky) has decided to acknowledge… I never owned a ZX Spectrum as a child, but I did get to play with one at a friend’s house and I later owned a Spectrum +2 which was the one with the built in tape player. Yes, I said tape player. In the old days, way back when computers were a new idea in households (places like NASA had had them for decades but they ran on valves…) and dinosaurs still walked the earth, computers plugged into your television (in my case an even older black and white portable with a dial to change channels) and loaded software from magnetic tape. By this point we’d evolved beyond the need for the massive banks of tapes you’d see in NASA’s mission control and were using the same sort of cassette tape we also used to pirate music on*. You loaded the tape into the player, pressed play and waited for several minutes while the computer screamed at you and made strange flashing lights on the screen. Then your game would load and you’d be able to play it. Slowly and with clunky graphics…

It wasn’t very long after that when floppy discs started to appear. Necessity breeds invention and the necessity here was to have something more efficient than a cassette tape to load your games on… Now I can play games far more advanced and requiring more memory on my mobile phone.

So, fond memories of the Zx Spectrum but a lot of gratitude for the 30 years of innovation that followed it…

What memories do you have of St George, Shakespeare or the ZX Spectrum?

 

*In those days, we replaced Napster and Bit Torrent and similar methods with a mate with a copy of the album and a tape recorder. They could also be used to make mix tapes for car journeys.

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