So I’m walking my kids slowly through last year’s Tempest movie, now that I have it on DVD.  By slowly I mean about 5-10 minutes at a time before they go to bed, with heavy voiceover.  They seem to be confused (not understanding a word of the dialogue), but interested.

So we’re at the scene where Ariel, singing “Full fathom five,” guides Ferdinand across the island to where Miranda can see him.  It’s easy to see a how a big part of the play is missed here.  The kids can see Ariel, singing.  They ask me whether Ferdinand can see Ariel, I say no.  I try to explain this whole idea that, from the perspective of the shipwrecked sailors, all they know is that they miraculously survived the wreck, showed up on shore with their clothes completely dry, and they hear music. It’s very important in a number of scenes that they want to follow the music, which we as the audience know is Ariel’s way of bringing them where he wants them to go.  The music is so prevalent that even the child-monster Caliban gives his beautiful speech about how not only is this magical sound no big deal, but he’s actually come to quite love it.

Very hard to convey that on film, where we’ve become so used to separating out the idea of “soundtrack” that it’s difficult to understand when the characters on screen can hear the music and when they can’t. On top of that you have to get across the idea of “following” the music, which seems to be coming from over there somewhere.  To the film audience, the music is coming from the same place the dialogue is coming from, it has no direction.

So that gets me to my discussion question.  Let’s say that you’re staging a Tempest.  What sort of special things can you do with the music to get this point across?  I’m thinking of stuff like having speakers randomly behind and around (under?) the audience so we can feel where precisely the music is coming from, and have the characters actually come out into the crowd, literally trying to follow it.

That’s a very specific question, but I’m also curious about broader answers on the whole “What can you accomplish with live theater that is hard-to-impossible on film?”

My girls got Kindle Fires for Christmas, so my 5yr old son has basically taken my old iPhone and uses it for his own game playing.

Just now he wanders in, face in the screen, and says, “Daddy, I’m reading Shakespeare.”

I look at the iPhone and sure enough he’s gotten into my Shakespeare app.  Specifically, Winter’s Tale.

“Oh,” I tell him, “You’ve got Winter’s Tale there.  That’s a hard one.”  He is actually looking at the Dramatic Personae.

“Well I don’t know what the words say,” he tells me, “But I like to look at the words.”  He has never grown out of the little speech thing he has were all his “er” sounds come out like “or”, so “words” actually sounds like “wards” and it is the cutest darned thing. 🙂

“You can always sound out the words and find the ones you do know,” I tell him.

“Can you find me Hamlet?”

“Sure,” I tell him, and bring up Hamlet, Act I.

He tries to walk away reading it, then quickly comes back saying, “I don’t know these words. Can you find me To be or not to be?”

“Sure,” I tell him again, and show him how to look up Act III.  I find the speech he wants and show it to him.

Off he goes, reading Hamlet.  I’m sure he put it down 2 seconds after he left the room, but still, gotta love the boy.

So I was flipping through Othello today helping somebody look for a monologue, and I was struck by Emilia’s reaction to Othello right at the end of the play, where Othello basically says, “Iago told me everything,” and it all falls into place for Emilia.  Check it out:

OTHELLO

Cassio did top her; ask thy husband else.
O, I were damn’d beneath all depth in hell,
But that I did proceed upon just grounds
To this extremity. Thy husband knew it all.

EMILIA

My husband!

OTHELLO

Thy husband.

EMILIA

That she was false to wedlock?

OTHELLO

Ay, with Cassio. Nay, had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and Perfect chrysolite,
I’ld not have sold her for it.

EMILIA

My husband!

OTHELLO

Ay, ’twas he that told me first:
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.

EMILIA

My husband!

OTHELLO

What needs this iteration, woman? I say thy husband.

Emilia repeats the exact same line 3 times.  Othello even asks her, “Why do you keep repeating yourself?”

Somebody get into her head for me.  How do you play that? Is it denial?  Not necessarily that her husband is a bastard, I’m sure she knows that – I’m thinking more that Emilia recognizes that if *she’d* seen through Iago sooner, then Desdemona might still be alive.

Or is it more like, “That son of a b*tch, I’ll kill him!” Like she’s not even listening to Othello. She’s already put everything together in her head, and now the fact that she keeps saying “My husband” over and over again has nothing to do with Othello.

Or something else?

Mostly just curious. If she’d said it once, or if she’d worded it differently each time, I wouldn’t even have noticed.  But the repetition is obviously there for a reason, so as an actor or director, how do you make it work? Why does she do that?

Here’s one of those times where I get to ask the readers a question.  I’ve heard the name David Garrick mentioned frequently enough in the history of Shakespeare.  But I don’t really know much about him.  So, rather than just going to read his wikipedia page I thought I’d ask the audience.  What I’m mostly curious to is this – would you argue that he was a major positive force in crafting the image of Shakespeare we know today, or do you think that perhaps he did more harm than good by catapulting Shakespeare until into that “literary deity” realm, causing people to spend the last 200+ years trying to knock him back down to reality?