WEEK EIGHT IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Today we spent an hour and a half acting class on this one line. It was amazing, probably the best class we have had all term. It’s true, my brain aches and a drowsy numbness pains by sense and I’m questioning whether to go on (I can’t go on. I’ll go on) but it was extraordinary. If it be now, ‘tis not to come? If it be now, ‘tis not to come? Yet it will come? Yet it will come? The agony of the stress, the sense. We all went for the former you will be pleased to know, although a certain person of nationality that will be nameless, insisted on the latter in both cases. What-ever, as Will wouldn’t have said.

We were dizzy with all these words, words, words (see how I did that – sorry – I am an embarrassment), but in a drunk kind of way, like children discovering something for the first time: as every English teacher you’ve ever had told you: he’s such a fucking genius. It’s so rich. There’s so much to do with it. Can you possibly say that without sounding like a tourist just landed in Shakespeare-land-upon-Avon? Obviously not.

To defend what is sounding like a cloyingly naive homage to the Bard, I must say that’s it’s because when I’ve studied it before (at school) no one had a f**king clue what was being said, so it came out as a string of bizarre, halting incantations worse than nails down a blackboard. How many school children have willed Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth and Richard to die by the end of act one? Then suddenly this mahogany-voiced old dude whose been acting, darling, since Kean’s day starts to tell us what the words mean and we pups of the stage start getting it. It makes sense. Such sense. And you don’t need anything else. Just these perfect lines. School plays were always about endless props and dodgy costumes made from old curtains: no wonder, we were trying to cover up that we had no idea what we were saying. Now you realise you need nothing but the words, no props, no fancy technical shit. Words, words, words. A strange and late epiphany you might think, but I tell you, everyone came away with the fear of iambic pentameter lifted and a new desire to do nothing but early modern verse speaking. Bring it on.

I just wonder why I’ve bothered to write this diary all term (and please don’t all write in to say you’ve been wondering that too). Why not just publish a soliloquy every week? He knew. Read this:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire! Why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!