{"id":14381,"date":"2013-01-30T14:14:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-30T19:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2013\/01\/30\/14381.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:05:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:05:00","slug":"one-man-in-his-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2013\/01\/30\/one-man-in-his-time\/","title":{"rendered":"One Man in his Time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well. I did the monologue I talked about<\/a> a couple of weeks ago for an audition. The play is As You Like It<\/i>; the part I particularly wanted was Jaques. That actually was important to the monologue because I particularly did not want to be cast as Touchstone. Touchstone is the professional fool in the play, and he is particularly dire. Shakespeare’s fools are generally unfunny, and Touchstone, in my opinion, is among the worst—he has a million lines, most of them with very heavy puns or paradoxes, and the rest with fart jokes. It’s odd, actually, for a sexy play like this one, that there seem to be fewer dick jokes and more fart jokes than in most of the canon. Anyway, I loathe Touchstone. But I adore Jaques.\n

Jaques is the other fool, the amateur fool. He’s an odd duck, and everybody thinks of him as an odd duck. I think he’s the only character of note that doesn’t get married at the end (except for the already-married people, parents and whatnot). He’s a foreigner, with a foreign name, and he’s clearly an outsider. People are fond of him—maybe more indulgent than fond—and he has to be likable, but it’s not clear that he is<\/I> likeable. He is melancholy, and everybody including himself talks about him as being melancholy, but he also has strenuous enthusiasms and jokes incessantly. In other words, he’s a challenge.\n

And, speaking of challenges, he’s got this bit about the seven ages of man. It’s not Top Five Shakespeare Monologue for audience expectations, not any more, but it’s probably still top ten.\n

Anyway. The monologue went no better than OK. The director asked me to do it again without “acting”, very simply, and I did, and he seemed to like that. Then I got to read the Rosalind scene, and again he had us do it again “more simply”, actually putting us in chairs facing away from each other. And then, since I was still around, he had me read Silvius for a Phebe in III,v. That was clearly just to have somebody for a Phebe to read with, though. I left the night thinking that I had done fairly well, but not extremely well. It would depend on who else was auditioning. As it always does, of course.\n

Then there was a callback, and another callback. I think the first callback was for the young persons; I was at the second one, for the Dukes and Touchstones and so forth. There were five us fogeys looking for the various fogey parts. I think there was one other fellow who was focused on Jaques particularly, a much older (looking) man with a quiet voice but a nice line in melancholy—If the director wanted to emphasize the melancholy aspect, that would be a perfectly good way to go. The other three were pretty good as well, though, and I left that callback not having any idea at all who would be cast as what. In particular, of course, whether I would be cast at all, and if so, in what part.\n

And… I found myself, over the next couple of days, wanting to get cast as Jaques. Really, really wanting it. Eager to get to work on the part, dig in to the text, think about the various possibilities. In point of fact, I braved superstition and did some initial research, looking at Alan Rickman’s essay about the 1985 RSC production and getting my hands on the correct volume of the wonderful Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production<\/a> series.\n

When the email came, this morning, with the cast list attached, my gut clenched. The document seemed to take forever to open. And forever to scroll down the page through the fourteen parts and people who were neither Jaques nor YHB. And on the fifteenth line, there are both.\n

So. For those Gentle Readers who will be or can be in the area in May, Your Humble Blogger will be playing Jaques in As You Like It<\/I>. And I expect that between now and then I will be writing about the part, about the play, the text, the process, and all the that goes with it.\n

So we have that to look forward to.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger begins a fifth, I think, Shakespeare production. Fifth? Hamlet<\/cite>, Shrew<\/cite>, R3<\/cite>, As You Like It<\/cite>. Fourth, then. Unless I’m missing one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16725,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions\/16725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}