Reflections on Shakespeare ...

Some thoughts on Shakespeare after seeing BTE's As You Like It with my wife and eight-year-old daughter on Friday.

Walking to the show, Sofie (the eight-year-old) announced that she knows all about Shakespeare ...

A girl dresses up as a boy and proves that girls can do everything boys can do.

(Sofie has seen She's the Man, an absolutely fabulous tween film adaption of Twelfth Night that manages to be simultaneously fresh and fairly faithful.)

That's the thing about Shakespeare. You can adapt it, streamline it, or go huge and it remains essentially awesome.

But whether live or even on film, there is nothing like seeing Shakespeare performed. The words are so stuffed with meanings ... it's almost too much to absorb comfortably by reading. A handful of lines can almost stand as plays in themselves.

An interesting (and unusual) metaphor for the density of information is pure perfume oil described by Luca Turin in his (unexpectedly interesting) book Perfume ...

Pure oils tend to have very dense smells in which the components are hard to discern, which can make you miss most of the point of a well-crafted perfume. It's as if the story of the fragrance were written in very small print. The appropriate dilution opens up the fragrance and makes it legible to your nose. 

And so it is with Shakespeare for me. Somehow a performance gives the words space and room so the mind can unravel and contemplate them.

A few more random thoughts about the BTE production.

• The rock band on stage had a cool Brian Eno/Robert Fripp vibe going. 
• For me, Daniel Roth in particular brought a memorable dignity to the melancholic Jacques (of the "All the world's a stage" speech.) 

— EFG.

PS: FWIW. Here's a vote for Twelfth Night.