Hamlet is good for your health

Hamlet can continue to smoke like a chimney thanks to HAMLET:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100419132403.htm


.. more on Hamlet is good for your health

A vibrating sensation inevitably induced by the South of France

Buzz, buzz.
.. more on A vibrating sensation inevitably induced by the South of France

Dancing Queens

What about costumes? Well, what about them? ...

Costumes, in an amateur production, are always a bit of a problem. Either you have a very good (and most of the time impossible to realize) idea of what your costume is going to be from the start - or you just go to the costume shop and find something that fits you and that fits the part.

That's how we made it work for As You Like It - and somehow it did work.


For this production, we have something of an in-betweener: our original idea was indeed impossible to realize - so we went for another idea we did find in a costume shop. 


It's funny how we need to rehearse in our costume - or bits of it - how it makes you move differently and do things differently. How unique it is.


Imagine you, as a person, had only one outfit to choose from. One. For your everyday life. That'd be it. Now, ask yourself: what would you go for? 


A hard bit of decision, ain't it? 


We're lucky enough we found our costume - and let me tell you, it looks great. It's painful and huge and black and funny - it definitely embodies our version of Ros and Guil. Looking forward to show it to you, dear reader!


On another note, our little troupe is leaving for South of France tonight! We're taking advantage of the Easter break to go and rehearse in Nadia's family villa near St Tropez - or how to mix business and pleasure.


Will definitely feedback you on our progress from there!


Love,
Guil 
.. more on Dancing Queens

The actor acts, but does the play?

Stoppard says he started out as a "language nerd", no more. Later, he said: "I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness."

A couple years earlier, someone who also wrote funny plays said: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." His name was Oscar Wilde. Not many people know this, but he also wrote an essay entitled "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", a utopian plea for social change, wherein he posits: "The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful". 

What is the use of Art? - the debate is endless. I like to think of it this way: it's so much easier to tackle the useful if you indulge in the useless from time to time. And sometimes, now and again, the useless breeds the useful. In time, Stoppard's plays have become more politically engaged, touching on themes such as censorship, rights abuse and repression. Everything that forbids expression, artistic or not, useful or less. 

Guil: Now mind your tongue, or we'll have it out and throw the rest of you away, like a nightingale at a Roman feast. 

Ros: Took the very words out of my mouth. 

Guil: You'd be lost for words. 

Ros: You'd be tongue-tied. 

Guil: Like a mute in a monologue. 

Ros: Like a nightingale at a Roman feast. 

Guil: Your diction will go to pieces. 

Ros: Your lines will be cut. 

Guil: To dumbshows. 

Ros: And dramatic pauses. 

Guil: You'll never find your tongue. 

Ros: Lick your lips. 

Guil: Taste your tears. 

Ros: Your breakfast. 

Guil: You won't know the difference. 

Ros: There won't be any. 

Guil: We'll take the very words out of your mouth. 

Later in his career, Stoppard said: "I think I was too concerned when I set off, to have a firework go off every few seconds... I think I was always looking for the entertainer in myself and I seem to be able to entertain through manipulating language... [but] it's really about human beings, it's not really about language at all."

Perhaps. Then again, it did take him a lot of fooling around with language to get there. Supposedly, there's a there for everyone. I am 27 and I haven't gotten there yet. But I feel like I'm getting closer, and Ros and Guil have a little something to do with it. So, thank you Stoppard, for taking the very words out of your head and putting them on the page. You're very useful like that. 

 

.. more on The actor acts, but does the play?

Poster Fever

It's out and looking dead good! Thanks to Zak's amazing work! Check out his website http://www.zakvanbiljon.com/

.. more on Poster Fever

Ros, Guil and the Post-feminists

So, shall I talk about the elephant in the room? It sure looks like it wants a good patting. Ok, well, let’s then, let’s pat the elephant and talk about Ros and Guil being female, when really they’re supposed to be male.

There’s not much sex in this play – it’s very unArcadia-like in that way, even less Shakespearean. Not that talking about gender necessarily implies talking about sex – or does it? That is the question, but it’s not the question here, so let’s not digress.

So, no, there isn’t much sex in this play. Well, there’s the Player of course and he – I mean she in our play – is quite into it. Then again, s/he’s a player. However, it seems it’s only because the times are bad, indifferent really, so frankly there’s not much choice but to talk about it (according to the player’s logic then, the times are constantly bad, indifferent really). Ok, so the player is a little bit of a perv, I’ll give you that. Well, Guil and especially Ros definitely think so. And Elodie’s exhilarating French accent isn’t helping. It’s doing an amazing job at toning up the sexual undertones, both un- and intentionally.

And then, of course, there’s the action that’s happening backstage, you know, with Gertrude going to Claudius for “comfort” while somebody’s body is still warm… “Indecent”, “hasty”, “suspicious” and all of those things, say Ros and Guil… and they’re right I suppose. It does make you think and it does add up. “Incest to adultery…” Yes, you can go so far. And yet. I wouldn’t overthink it. You’d end up mad, like Hamlet. Who knows, maybe G was really feeling lonely, and C was hanging around looking all like his dead brother and it sort of just happened – as these things often do. And maybe he did a really good job at finding her G point, so she gave him the crown because maybe she’d never known anything like it (today, a powerful woman might have given him candy, if anything at all). Maybe it’s as simple as that. Because, it’s true, we women are more complicated at that level – that’s a difference I’m willing to acknowledge. Maybe that’s why men are called hunters: there’s a lot of searching, aiming and waiting to do. It’s not easy.

Ok, just to fill you in on why this is going where it’s going – we’ve all been reading The Vagina Monologues in parallel to working on this play. A completely random occurrence I can assure you (I stumbled upon it in Waterstones during our stay in London last month). Then again, I think there’s always something quite deliberate about the random – n’est-ce pas Monsieur Stoppard – because, as it turns out, in our version of RGAD, let’s face it, Ros and Guil have vaginas. The question is does it make a difference?

To be honest, we haven’t thought about it that much. We were looking for a play with a small cast, not too long and that had something to do with Shakespeare. And so when Ros and Guil came unto the scene, we fell in love instantly. They were exactly what we were looking for: they make us laugh and think, work hard and enjoy life, they’re demanding without being invasive – they leave us feeling free and fulfilled. And what do they get in return - castration. Life's a bitch.

The thing is maybe that’s what post-feminism is all about. The fact that it doesn’t matter anymore, that it doesn’t make such a huge difference whether Ros and Guil are male or female. Implications it will have and interpretations it will call for and we hope it does. We’ve made all the pronouns feminine, our costumes will have elements of femininity and masculinity and I suppose our poster can be read as representing femininity in decay or the decay of the feminine, as you wish. At the end of the day, it all rests in the eye of the beholder. It’s open to debate, to interpretation and hopefully to progress, but it’s no longer at the centre. And that in itself is (r)evolution. Thanks to the women who fought for us – those feminist bitches – we can be Ros and Guil and Ros and Guil can be us, and it really doesn’t matter all that much. Not anymore.      

.. more on Ros, Guil and the Post-feminists

The Truth

While learning the lines for a play, some tend to stand out more than others. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I'd like to share Guil's reflections about truth:

"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque."

This is particularly relevant for our very grotesque production, but it is also very relevant for life in general: we don't really want to face up to truth, because when we do, we are disappointed and sad and angry. We're rather go on knowing It is out there somewhere, comfortably seated in the living-room armchair, smoking its pipe in its slippers and velvet gown, and reading a good book (most probably Hamlet).

Part of the tremendous fun of this play is that Guil is a seemingly wise character, who's in fact very stupid, and Ros is a seemingly stupid character who's in fact very wise. The question is: which one of these would you rather be?

Guil It's all questions.

It is very challenging to set something so funny and yet so self-reflective, tragic and deep and to be faithful to all these things - in an hour and fifteen minutes! We don't wanna lose the tragedy and the philosophy of it, and we want people to enjoy these moments - but we want to make them laugh as well, because this play is so funny (and because otherwise everyone'd fall asleep). So how do you do that?

How do you get to the truth of theatre? - that thin line between tragedy and comedy? That exquisitely precise balance?



Ros Answers, yes. There were answers to everything.

Guil You've forgotten.

Well, we'll see if we can grasp a bit of truth, and if you, dear spectator, will be able to help us nudge it into outline.

.. more on The Truth

Nuclear Bomb Chicken

Dear reader,


I want to share with you this exercise we did on Sunday called "Nuclear Bomb Chicken."


It goes like this: all the players pretend to be chicken for a while.


So far so good.


*Pwkawk!* ( <-- chicken noise)


Then, the leader of the warming-up announces there's a nuclear bomb approaching the earth.


It's still far away.


But it's coming.


We can see it in the sky now.


Closer.


It fills up the sky.


It's huge and blazin'.


You can hear it coming - it flies really fast towards the farm.


BOOM!!!


The nuclear bomb exploded.

Now, during this exercise, while being a chicken, some actors react to what's going on.

Some don't. And, well, these one are right - a chicken has no clue of what's going on before it actually happens.

That, dear reader, is an exercise about reacting to other players' lines during a play. You, as a character, don't know what's coming next. You can't plan a reaction. 

And it's really difficult - to forget the play, to act genuinely surprised, or emotional, or sad or happy or disgusted.

Story goes, while doing this exercise in preparation for a movie, all the actors were going chicken-frantically crazy when the bomb was approaching, while Marlon Brando was laying an egg.

.. more on Nuclear Bomb Chicken

Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways.

Dear reader,

We had the most interesting conversation with Nadia the other day - about what we want out of life. We both arrived at this crossroads, where you need to make "grown-up" choices society wants you to make. We need to determine how we're gonna pay tax.

Theatre is such a nice hobby - it changed both mine and Nadia's life. But does it? - pay tax I mean. In Switzerland, or in any other country, theatre is such a difficult job to live out of. Nadia told me once, about her experience as the assistant of a casting agent in London: "I admire them so much. These people, these actors who know they absolutely can NOT do anything else with their life."

But we can - both her and me. We have literature - university, business, other carriers possible. And the taunting question remains: if you make theatre your job, would it be less rewarding? Less fun? More stressful? - Probably. But maybe not. We'd need to try to know.

Rosencrantz How could I know, we haven't gotten there yet.

Guildenstern Then what are we doing here, I ask myself.

Rosencrantz You might well ask.

Guildenstern We better get on.

Rosencrantz You might well think.

Guildenstern We better get on!

Rosencrantz On where?

Guildenstern Forward.

So here you are. And you have to go forward.

But maybe we don't wanna pay tax like other people. Maybe we don't want a house in the suburbs, two kids, a car and a husband. Not yet anyway.

The real question is: what do you want out of life?

Some people want money and security. Some people want happiness and sex. Some people want kids and health.

We want love and passion.

Well, at least we've figured out that much.

But now what? - Every story told backwards always seems to make perfect sense. In ten years, I'll be talking about staging "Ros and Guil Are Dead" and I'll be going like: "You see, I totally knew this would lead me here."

Or maybe I'd have forgotten about Ros and Guil. They're full of themselves these two, aren't they? And they are traitors after all - the bad guys. And, most of all, they are dead. 

Guildenstern ... you can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen--it's not gasps of blood and falling about--that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all--now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back--an exit, unobstrusive and unnanounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

We're in front of choices all the time. What makes the difference is the ones you make.

And what makes the difference, is how and why we decide to make them. We might not make what seems like the "right" choice at the "right" time to other people-but we know what we want out of life. And if getting those things makes us take different, cheaper, harsher, slower roads with bumps on the way and cart wheels you have to learn to change... that's just fine. We know we'll get there - and we don't care if people don't understand why.

The Player We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

So thank you, dear reader, for following us this far,

And remember: always keep questioning. Old ways are the best ways.

Love,

Guil

.. more on Question and answer. Old ways are the best ways.

Buzz, buzz

Documenting today's amazing rehearsal of Act 2 with my amazing new camera! 

Outside the building, enjoying the sun

When Nadia broke her finger!

Ros and Guil are confused.

Team work!

Hamlet and his famous chicken.

Loveliest picture ever!!!

Panorama of our lakeside post-rehearsal chill time!

Good night dear reader!

.. more on Buzz, buzz

If Ros and Guil were brothers and had a last name, what would it be? - Random.

Dear reader,


It's about time I told you a little something about how we're directing this play, without giving too much away of course. I've been meaning to tell you much sooner, but hopping as I've been from one book fair to the next, time to blog has been difficult to find. Before I go into detail though, a little intro for you, something I scribbled down on a piece of paper somewhere between Paris and Bologna, between piles of books featuring red pandas and my boss' endless monologues on how to be an IT expert without ever touching a computer. My friend Dr. Nick Walton from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust said it best: it must be absurd learning absurd lines in absurd situations. Well, it is.


For some people, things get served on silver platter. Don't get me wrong, they work hard too, but things do come easily, or let's say, more easily than for others. For me, things got served not on a, but on many silver platters - for Victoria, it was wooden ones.
The question is - and "it's all questions" - how do you make a choice? How do you make randomness look like a finely chiseled path to that place? That place that's got your name on it. That place you know exists because Miss Intuition's been giving you a show of legs, but have no idea what it looks like, how or when you're supposed to get there.
I've never really thought about the cosmos or believed in Karma - I'm not that kind of girl. And yet. It's funny how past enemies have become best of friends. Victoria's great-grandparents were as red as raw meat; mine were as white as snow. They had to leave Russia, hers stayed on. I grew up in opulence, Victoria remembers days of famine, days when shops were empty. What's stranger still is that a genius of an Englishman, long since buried at the very heart of England, brought us together. That's the very significant power of art - it transforms our insignificant lives in insignificant ways that matter to us.


Guil: Do you think it matters?


Ros: Doesn't it matter to you?


Guil: Why should it matter?


Ros: What does it matter why?


Guil: Doesn't it matter why it matters?


Ros: What's the matter with you?


Guil: It doesn't matter.


I think it matters to think it matters, no matter how little it matters to others. But that's not always easy. Just like staging something as structurally random as Stoppard's play isn't a piece of cake. Words, words, words. Lots of them, a couple here and a couple there, shooting off of the page and unto the stage, like ping pong balls - and then big chucks of them all at once. Vic's currently toiling away at one hell of a biggie that's got no head or tail - Consistency is all we ask, Tom! Stop being so brilliantly haphazard, we enjoy it so much it's almost unbearable! Plus, your play is like in another play, another existing play that happens to be a not to say the masterpiece - and let's just say it's complicated. Something about a guy who's seen his father ghost although nothing proves he has and then goes about his castle - aka the state of Denmark where something is rotting - pretending to be mad (or not) and driving everyone mad, e.g. he tells a girl to bugger off to a nunnery before killing her father,  at which point she goes all power to the flowers on everyone and commits suicide in a pond. And then everyone else gets killed and dies, including yes you got it - Hamlet. So, no, Tom hasn't made it easy because how boring would that be, and neither have we. It seems we're just as mad as H staging this play in English for a French-speaking audience. Then again, where there's a WILL there's a way, they say. And ways we have found. It's all about what's become my favorite word lately... Physicalizing. Embodying the words, if you will. Making them and the worlds they imply visible. Come and see us, and you'll know what I mean.


Below, the breakdown of our directorial approach en français s'il vous plait!! It's very formal, and pompous, and French, but it's doing it's thing, it's bringing in the money, so we'll let it show off all it wants!


MISE EN SCENE 

Ce qui fait l’originalité de Stoppard, c’est sa maîtrise parfaite des influences. Se distinguer dans l’écriture, c’est avant tout reconnaître que tout auteur est une marionnette attachée aux plumes de ceux qui le précédent. A l’exemple de Shakespeare dont aucune pièce n’est à proprement parlé « originale », Stoppard révolutionne la scène anglo-saxonne des années soixante en tirant fort sur les ficelles qui le rattachent au plus grands des dramaturges bien sûr, mais aussi à Wilde, à Beckett, à Pinter et à bien d’autres encore – et ceci tout en humour et en philosophie.

Notre mise en scène se concentre justement sur cette figure de la marionnette, qui sert de métaphore non seulement pour illustrer le procédé créatif de Stoppard, mais surtout pour traduire le ressenti de ces deux personnages traditionnellement secondaires, devenus principaux sous l’emprise de la modernité.

Nous avons écourté la pièce à la fois par un souci de temps et dans l’optique de créer une mise en scène plus intimiste: Ros et Guil seront constamment sur scène, interrompus seulement par l’Acteur et son compagnon Alfred ainsi que par Hamlet. (Une série de personnages de la pièce originale ne figureront pas). Néanmoins, afin de maximiser le jeu de chacun et de faire parler plus que les mots, l’Acteur et Hamlet endosseront par moments également le rôle de marionnettistes, dirigeant les faits et gestes des guignols de scène que sont Ros et Guil. Privés d’autonomie d’action et sans aucune emprise sur leur destinée, n’y aurait-il pas justement dans leur délire dialogique – ce rejet du sens que donnent les mots – un élément de révolte, une prise de liberté ? En plus de réaliser une esthétique de scène pantomimique, intégrant quelques éléments de danse, nous espérons par ce biais faire réfléchir le public, l’amener à débattre sur la question de la liberté que le concept du déterminisme semble interdire.

Cet accompagnement très physique du texte au sein d’une pièce foncièrement verbale s’agence aussi en tant que support à la compréhension, ceci afin de garantir l’accès au génie humoristique de Stoppard, qui réside non seulement dans le dialogue, mais aussi dans le potentiel d’exploitation de son agencement scénique. En effet, l’humour est à l’ordre du jour autant que la réflexion : nous souhaitons que le public se surprenne à rire à une pièce dont il ne comprendra pas forcément toutes les nuances de par les connaissances linguistiques et culturelles qu’elle exige.

Enfin, cette mise en scène pantomimique autour de la figure de la marionnette est également une manière de mettre l’accent sur la dimension méta-textuelle on ne peut plus évidente de cette pièce-au-sein-d’une-pièce. Souligner que les faits, gestes et paroles sont préfabriqués, sujets à l’élégante dictature d’une chorégraphie, c’est faire l’éloge de l’artifice qu’est la scène tout en y jouant, c’est permettre à la réalité arbitraire de reprendre son souffle le temps d’une mise en scène des joies et des peines qu’elle nous fait traverser. 

Next time, a little more about how rehearsals are going, our trip to le sud de la France and hopefully an update on our poster which is currently in the making! Ah *Excitement*


Oh and Victoria, I love you, you know I do!
.. more on If Ros and Guil were brothers and had a last name, what would it be? - Random.

Fécule excitement!

Dear reader,

As you might (not) know, I am currently working at the reception desk of the University's Informatic Helpdesk Center and Unicom (media and communications center). And the good news about that job is - apart from being a PERFECT student job with lovely colleagues - that I know the boss of the graphic department, aka. the guy who's in charge of the Fécule programmes!
Lots of excitement yesterday, when I learned they're officially coming out on Monday!

As a preview, here's the Fécule's poster:

And our play on their website:

http://www3.unil.ch/wpmu/fecule/programme-2011-par-jour/lundi-9-mai/

We're also occupying a very honourable place in the dossier de presse, check it out here:
http://www3.unil.ch/wpmu/fecule/

So that's it! *Excitement*

Rehearsals start again tomorrow for us, after a few busy weeks on everybody's side! Nadia has been away in every corner of Europe for various bookfairs with her reknowned boss, and we three other actors have been busy as little bees with another project. We staged "A MidAutumn Night's Dream", a Shakespeare wonderland patchwork fantasia for one of our retired teachers and Shakespeare & Milton famous scholar, Neil Forsyth. It was a genuinely magic night, and we played at the Grange as well!
But now it's time to go back to Ros and Guil, and to prepare for the fun to come!

So good night unto you all,
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.*

*I finally played Puck! - my dream-part for quite some time now! Ah, the magic of theatre!
.. more on Fécule excitement!