Would somebody PLEEEASE shut down twitter!!!

… and this time it’s not about Donald Trump. (Though this should be the final proof of Gods non-existence – if any was needed after Hitler and Stalin! – that she hasn’t done it yet. Just to see what will happen … or stop happening. No doubt the world would stop turning. I suppose, though, that, if she existed, she’d be a lot cleverer than I am and would probably have decided that the world needs a move on …) No, I meant about “Ocean’s 8”! Luckily I just saw a trailer and decided that I would see the film – WITHOUT knowing that Richard Armitage played the “villain”. HONEST! I didn’t even see him in the trailer – which is weird … And I honestly don’t get it how people can make time for twitter. (Of course I don’t twitter, but Claudia gave me a shout ...) I obviously didn’t even get around to looking into the Internet Movie Database during the last few months. Good! Saved me weeks (or months) of skittishness. Now I AM skittish …

So, there is my own “tweet” – just because. (I don’t regret that I don’t twitter for real because I would have been too late anyway, and my tweet would have come long after the shit storm had blown over.)

I don’t know Chris Pine, so I can’t really judge. “No name” will be over for good, though, after this! Welcome to the world of fame and fortune!

So, that’s done!!! Just to get rid of the skittishness until I see him again in the cinema. (Interesting that to know that Ralph Fiennes will be in a film gets me excited, to know that Simon Russell Beale will makes me happy, and to know that Richard Armitage will makes me skittish …) But most of the skittishness was due to so much happening, and there was just no time for writing about it. So I decided to skip everything I planned to write about and to get on with what just happened on the spaceship named “Shakespeare” which I built in my blog ( – sorry, but I am rather into “Doctor Who” right now!) And THIS really is exciting because I think the ship JUST LAUNCHED …

What I will do in this post is to sum up what happened. I think this will take a while anyway.

It began way back into our last e-mail exchange where I brought up the concept of the “correctness” of an interpretation. Since then we met and had an exciting conversation which, I think, brought us much closer together. I wrote that I TRIED to disagree because I knew there was something I still didn’t understand and this was a way for me to find out what it was. When we talked it suddenly struck me that it was probably just a word. That “correctness” was just the wrong word for something we were both looking for, and which is crucial for both of us.

Before we met, Claudia wrote me an e-mail where she mentioned that she had spent part of her weekend on her balcony, watching “scraps” of “Hamlet” with Andrew Scott on UTube. I had been disappointed that, at the time, I had only found interviews with some scraps of monologue in them, and I somehow didn’t have the time – or the nerve – for “Hamlet”. But in the meantime they obviously released bigger parts of the production, like the closet scene, and I finally got around to watching this one. And I saw Andrew Scott and Juliet Stevenson play this and couldn’t believe what I had missed …

Even before I could watch anything, though, I read a sentence from an interview by Andrew Scott about “To be or not to be …”:

“These lines were not written to be famous, they were written to be authentic.”

And THIS was the moment when it launched.

I knew this as soon as I had read it, and e-mailed Claudia:

“After having struggled for hours with one of the most hideous periodicals I have encountered in my life – successfully, in the end! – I thought I deserved a bit of “Hamlet” and looked up Andrew Scott on UTube. Even before I could open anything this quotation struck me: “These lines …”

And THIS is exactly what I wanted to explain and somehow didn’t get across when we last talked. This is what I missed when I saw Benedict Cumberbatch, and why I am so sorry that I will never see the Almeida’s production.”

She answered this with the comment that “authentic” – like “correct” - might be opening another can of worms. Who is to judge about what is “authentic” …???

Then came the weekend where I took time off all this, spending endless hours repairing my bathroom floor and making endless corrections to my “fan fiction” … and, on Monday, after having gone through the shit pile on my desk, I found time to REALLY watch the closet scene. That was already in the afternoon, and I just e-mailed something like

“I finally watched the closet scene, and I am blown away …”

And now things began to boil up (– even though twitter got in the way …) Obviously Claudia had been thinking about “authentic” and got back to me with something which I know I have already written more than once in my blog, but it didn’t really “launch” until now.

“… About authenticity – this was one of the things that left such a lasting impression when I saw “Henry V”: the characters talked as if these sentences came to them naturally, not as if they recited a given text.”

And THIS is exactly what “authentic” means – and it is EXACTLY what I wish to see more than anything. And, like Claudia, I went back to where it happened to me for the first time IN THIS WAY. And I noticed that it hadn’t been Shakespeare. It had been Schiller – not surprisingly because Schiller is what comes closest to Shakespeare as to the “charged” quality of the language on a German stage, and I couldn’t see any Shakespeare in English at the time. It was a production of “Die Räuber” at the Augsburg theatre which I frequented at the time. And at the time I thought I was just bored with my life and desperate to get so deeply into something weird like this. (I think I saw the production about seven times!) But now I know that there was a REAL reason, and I even know what it was. Very unusual for this kind of play, they decided to produce it “without gimmicks”, just concentrating on the text, making the “blown up” language fill a huge and empty stage, and the actors rose to the challenge. It was utterly beautiful and satisfying because, by using the text like this, they transcended it towards its HUMAN QUALITY which we MUST experience if we partake in the beauty and precision. For the actors there is an infinite amount of hard work, and intelligence, and skill required to work themselves “through” a text like this AND make it authentic. I noticed this on behalf of Andrew Scott – how difficult it is to make it authentic and not sacrifice most of the text  – without which there would be no authenticity; it just becomes random feelings. Sometimes - when the text becomes too verbous - he can hardly manage. Hamlet’s lines can be a REAL bugger – even for Shakespeare! But the difficulties, I believe, partly come out of trying not to compromise on authenticity. It is just not possible to let all this text go "through you" in this way. I think I learned a lot about “Shakespeare acting” here, in a very short time, as I did in fact already watching Lucian Msamati playing Iago, or the amazing Martin Hutson (“no name”, not doubt!) playing Cassio in the RSC’s latest “Julius Caesar”.

I think it is this AUTHENTICITY which always “gets” us, and which is what I described, inefficiently, as “truth”. “Gimmicks” can be great; often they are great shortcuts to arrive faster at the heart of the matter, more often, probably, they are just diversions. This was where I THOUGHT we disagreed, but I got this feeling that we basically agree about the most important thing – that something extraordinary and singular MUST happen between an actor and a text. Which may then, in turn, happen to us. That the main thing is to get as close as we can. For the actor this means not to concentrate on playing the text brilliantly but to somehow get to what is really happening – to him! – when he “processes” these lines. For this, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet is a stellar example!

I realize already that this sudden breakthrough is also a bit of a setback because it makes so much of what I have written recently just meaningless. But this is what happens when the ship has finally launched: all the painstaking work of months (or years) suddenly doesn’t matter anymore. On the other side of it there lies the Unknown … Of course this scares me – main reason for the skittishness? – but it is also exciting. And, the best thing: I have a feeling that I am not the only passenger anymore. Of course, if you need the “world” to agree or disagree with, there is twitter, but for something AUTHENTIC to happen two appears like a good number.