Second Week of Run
Its Thursday. 3 down, 3 to go.
The Festival has started. Officially. Edinburgh is a mass of costumes, flyers, drunkenness and music.
Today's a birthday for one of the cast. Several people have birthdays around this time including the director. Its a sign we should all be working together. There may be a few drinks in town tonight after the show. And then a few more.
Show's in a good state. Audiences keep coming. My parents saw it on Saturday and liked it very much. My Mum said it was "a tour de force" and my Dad said it was "long". Fair enough, it is. But Mum saw it again last night and was more impressed. Said it has bedded in now and she enjoyed it more inside the the chapel – made for a more intense atmosphere, especially with the drama of the first scene.
Saw a programme about a guy who works in prisons in the US getting prisoners to perform Shakespeare plays. Amazing man of unbelievable compassion. And the process was the important thing, not the final performance. Very humbling to watch these guys looking deep in their souls for something of truth and hope. And of course they"get" Shakespeare. Their lives have only been fear and conflict and revenge and intolerance and love and loss and all the other themes no playwright but Shakespeare has been able to write about so clearly and beautifully. It sticks 2 fingers up to all that talk of the "relevance" of Shakespeare and (deeply-patronising) attempts to make it more "reachable" for "modern" audiences. Absolute crap. Just do the plays. And get on with it.
At one sticky point the prisoners got frustrated and the director had to calm them. He simple said: "All we do is we try and find the beauty and truth in the moment. And if we don't find it, we move on to the next and try and find it there."
Nothing more needs to be said.
