Arcadia

This book, I should start by saying, is a play by Tom Stoppard and has nothing to do with Guillermo del Toro's ongoing Netflix entanglements.* Much like the other play of his I've posted about before, this seems to be relatively minimal in terms of story, instead weaving another deft web of surmised interconnections and/or freshly-dug-up intellectual treasure in its intricate dialogue, which truly does throw you headfirst into these characters' world.

   To give you a taster without giving away any spoilers... well, first off I mean obviously go and see this live in a theatre if you ever get the chance! But onwards: we fluctuate between two time periods, the early 19th century and late 20th, with the constants between these being a library and concordant desk within which most of the action takes place. The action being, of course, one Bernard turning up at the stately home with the express intent of uncovering a historical long-buried plot involving trauma, shame, Lord Byron, and the quest for a mathematical theory capable of unfurling such meta-complexity within its parameters that the future's events can be ascertained through proper examination of events through this formula; long-dead and scarcely-known poet Chater and academic Hodge are responsible for nurturing this mathematical golem into life with the genius insights of young Thomasina, while in the deep future of the play, garden historian Hannah unpicks enough threads to shed light on the whole damn mix of stuff and ruins Bernard's project by pipping him to the post of truth. We by the curtain-fall are brought to the realisation that Newtonian physics is missing something of immense import to anthropocentric metaphysics: that is, the laws of sexual attraction, the missing piece of the Grand Formula's puzzle.

   If none of that makes sense then you might not get the play. But you'd probably enjoy it - as with Stoppard's other work that I've read, while there is an enormous amount of intellectual subtextual weight being lifted by almost every line uttered herein the speech itself flows with a naturalistic poise that muffles that otherwise-pretentious sheen on everything and brings you face to face with these intrepid bookish characters, for better or worse...

* Seriously, if you haven't seen or read Trollhunters, Wizards or 3 Below - get on that shit right now. It's kid-friendly epic fantasy for the 21st century done far more properly than properly even knows.

Hamlet

Okay it's cheating I know but I read all the subtitles so it kind of counts, even though it's in screen video/sound format - but it's worth it for one of the greatest plays in Western Literary history. My revisitation of the Great Danish play was undertaken for personal reasons, but it has helped me navigate the wider world in doing so since; also, for Yorick, Horatio and the others who, having dispensed such Excellent Catholic wisdoms - were thus also themselves confounded to the dust of memory, in time, in blood, and sometimes ink? A story so timelessly human that nearly five centuries later lions reenacting its basic gist remains one of the strongest unchallenged franchise boons in Disney's cupboards.

Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

This book, a play by Tom Stoppard which I acquired a secondhand copy of years ago after seeing it on-stage (at the Lantern Theatre in Nether Edge with my mum) and being so blown away by the sheer inventive ridiculousness of its utterly droll, meandering, angsty script - to be honest, I probably shouldn't have read it today, having just finished it in one sitting despite having the bulk of packing and cleaning to do as I'm moving out of my student house on Friday - but whatever - anyway. The play.

   If you're not familiar with William Shakespeare's (possibly?) best-known work, Hamlet,* this play would just be basically two guys chatting drivel about them not knowing what's going on. But even if you are familiar with Hamlet, that's kind of all it is. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's roles in Shakespeare's opus are so negligibly small, so devoid of agency and history and identity and context, that we can only speculate as to what those characters are like, how they reacted to the bizarre improbable circumstances in which they found themselves, and what, if anything, they could have tried to do to make things happen any other way. Of course, the unstoppable narrative train of Shakespearean tragedy rolls the plot inexorably onward and our two protagonists never really have a say in directing or even muchwise understanding it - they are simply happened to - all the way up to, as the title of the play (and the events of Hamlet) dictates, their unexpected, undeserved, and more or less meaningless deaths.

   The genius of this play lies in Stoppard's constant looping around this aimlessness of both its protagonists, their complete lack of individual decision-making (and even small occasions where they do try, their efforts yield little fruit or are foiled by other characters just confusing them) and even distinct identities (they don't remember their personal histories or trajectories, because Shakespeare never wrote them one - they for all intents and purposes exist to play a tiny role in the drama of their friend who was the heir to the Danish throne); buffeted about on the winds of chance, not knowing what is worth caring about or why or how they would even determine that, questioning whatever they see and hear and say and remember but having so little to go on in terms of determining what's going on around them that they have to just take everyone else's word for stuff anyway - they are bound to an objective deterministic fate, almost by chance and effectively out of their control, and all they can do is play their parts. Other than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern**** the only character from Hamlet who plays a largish role is the head of the troupe of players - allowing for some pretty meta and thoroughly amusing explorations of the existential quandaries which R & G find themselves in and how it in many ways reflects the condition of the actor generally.

   Dunno. I don't want to say too much - I just think this play adds so much extra brilliant depth to a pair of otherwise entirely unremarkable characters in what is probably one of the best plays of all time. If you know Hamlet already, read this; you will be bemused and enthused and most certainly amused. If you don't, well, they do say it's not for everyone, but who's they? Not whoever's writing this blog. I say, it's a flipping classic, so get it down you and then give this a go because it's incredibly funny, and to my mind the most unusually (almost lazily) thought-provokingly incisively little banger of a stageplay I've ever had the privilege of seeing. It was also a hoot to read.

* I don't want to do spoilers because it's great and you should read/watch** it and then also read/watch*** this, because it's so much grander in context.

** There are so many excellent screen adaptations of Hamlet that it doesn't even bear to list a handful of good ones. Google it or something.

*** There's a really good film adaptation starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman.

**** Years ago I got a pair of fishtank shrimps named this, because they were impossible to tell apart, and a recurring joke in the play is that nobody can tell the difference between R & G (they often fail to even properly differentiate between each other).

William Shakespeare's Star Wars

This book, it should probably be said immediately, isn't an actual work of the Bard, but a product of fantastic enthusiasm for both Shakespearean theatre and George Lucas' classic trilogy on part of Ian Doescher, who deserves an enormous amount of credit despite the entire thing being a mishmash of plagiarised content and style. Before I start talking about it though I want to thank my dear housemate Chris Hedges for leaving this book on the coffee table, and apologise to him for my temporary theft of it. You can have it back now.

   The book - what is there to say? For any fan of Shakespeare (I am) or fan of Star Wars (I also am), it's truly marvellous, a playful amalgamation of the sublime scripted style of the one and the powerful punchy plot of the other. Doescher has done an amazing job of converting the entire of Episode IV: A New Hope into iambic pentameter, complete with archaic wordage* and all the classic to-be-expected tropes of someone spoofing Shakespeare (straightforward phrases turned amusingly into poetic spurts of "verily", "forsooth" and so on).

   Moreover he goes the extra mile to inject theatrical colour and character into this already excellent story: while the plot remains exactly the same, with Luke and Han and C3PO and R2D2 and Leia and Obi-Wan and Chewbacca and Vader et al, he foresaw that the book's primary (or probably only) readers would be people familiar with both Shakespeare and Star Wars anyway. Taking advantage of this, the play (it's written as a playscript so yes I can call it that) is littered with half-quotes from Shakespeare's plays, and full of references both forwards and backwards within the Star Wars saga; perhaps the best added element though are the occasional [aside] monologues, that allow by dint of stage direction the characters to voice their thoughts and feelings in things that are implied but never said in the films (because monologues aren't dialogues so weren't in the film). These often give surprisingly poignant insights into the mindsets and intentions of the characters, especially those of Darth Vader, R2D2 and Han Solo. Well, R2D2's are just funny, but the others definitely show a lot of depth through these parts.

   The illustrations are definitely worth a mention too. The characters are easily recognisable but styled in as close to 16th century dress as their costumes can go - rendering Stormtroopers in suits of armour, Grand Moff Tarkin in a full lace ruff, and Jabba the Hutt with a feathered Jacobean cap. I can't say a great deal about them because by convention of clichéd wisdom it takes 1000 words to describe a single picture sufficiently, and I can't be bothered to write that much. They're hilarious though.

   I think probably the most enjoyable part of it was how easily it worked. Yes, Star Wars has a great story, and yes, Shakespearean English is an immediately recognisable form of writing, but to bring the two together and mesh them well enough that even the overlaps can be filled in believably and the whole read with casual bursts of mirth is an achievement indeed. If you like Shakespeare and Star Wars even a bit, you'll share my appreciation for this brilliantly quirky combination of the two.

* speaking of wordage, it must be remembered that many of the characters in the films don't even speak English at all - and where they do not, Doescher has transcribed their vocal output. Every consonant-dense garbled utterance in the Tattooine language of Jabba and Greedo, every harsh vowel-burp of the Jawas, every beep, meep, whistle, squeak, whee and whoo of R2D2; these are all written down and nonsensically fun to read.