Miscellaneous

I was very surprised to find a letter yesterday inviting me to an interview. I was sure that my letter of application had been put on a "definitely not" pile as soon as it was picked up, but using nice paper and banging on about my creativity seems to have worked in my favour. Now I have a few weeks to worry about what I'll do for a 20 minute poetry lesson . . .

I went to see As You Like It last night. It was only a £10 preview, so you can't expect perfection, but I didn't think it was great. One of the people I was there with was insistent that Orlando looked like Bruno Brooks! He lost his lines once, and Jacques didn't deliver the "All the world's a stage" speech very well: it seemed to stick out of the scene like a proverbial thumb. Rosalind was good, and the evil Duke was played like a Gestapo agent which was effective and amusing. But on the whole it didn't seem to gel, and many scenes and evem characters seemed completely redundant. Whether this was because of the performance or the original script, I don't know, though apparently Dr Johnson dismissed it as a "crowd-pleaser".

Still, it was nice to get to know another Shakespeare play. On the bus home I started thinking about how few of his plays I'm actually familiar with, and it was quite shocking.

Must read/see more Shakespeare.