Many years ago, when knee high to a giant, I spent a good chunk of my time doing youth theatre. I worked with an excellent one in Cornwall, where I met some of my longest-standing friends. I set a small one up in North Norfolk. And I did a few plays at uni… And then it all ground to a halt.
Fortunately one of those old friends has a whole lot more sense than I do about things I enjoy, and encouraged me to take part in a workshop she helped organize on Shakespeare in performance.
I confess it: Tish, thought I; surely I did rather well on my Shakespeare paper in Part One of Tripos? Wasn’t my USP my access to the text as it would be on stage? Hadn’t I actually got rather a decent idea of all this stuff, and hadn’t I in some ways rather less to learn that some of these people?
Naturally, and as is generally to be expected in life when one feels too sure of one’s own competence a long time after last exercising it, I was utterly, completely, and embarrassingly wrong.
Within ten minutes of the start, I’d remembered that, set against every inward textual thought I’d ever had whilst contemplating the performance of Shakespeare from my university sofa, there existed the actual production of it for an audience- a group of people who collectively constituted the fundamental reason I as an actor am on the stage, and whose presence profoundly inflects every turn of phrase or the foot. What the Riverside Shakespeare
Essentially, I’m saying I got rather over-excited by the whole thing and thoroughly enjoyed it. Bring me a board. I wish to tread it.
