We haven’t seen Coriolanus yet, that’s tomorrow night, but we attended the second of these talks about the upcoming all female production of Julius Caesar. A couple of the actors, the director and the line reader came to talk to us about the production and let me just say I am so pumped to see this you wouldn’t believe. This time we got a little insight into how they go about analysing the words and putting together a performance. It was quite remarkable. Very quickly, as the two actors performed a scene for us, you forgot they were two women and instead saw them as the male characters.
Only two weeks till we see this, yay! This is one of Shakespeare’s plays where I’ve actually read the text. A long time ago when I was at school, admittedly, but I’m sure a lot will come back when I hear the words. I memorised a lot of this play when I was fourteen.
Current temperature: here 14C/57F, there 29F/-1C
Actually, I don’t I did see them as the male characters, at least not in the short bit that they did for us. For me they were pretty genderless, as there wasn’t much in that bit that pinned down a specific gender. Part of that may have been the names. If they’d been Joe and Sam then I might have been more inclined to see them as male, but names like Casius are sufficiently rare in everyday life that they don’t (for me) have a visceral gender association.
All that said, the snippet we got was really cool, and I’m very much looking forward to the play. I remember reading it in school at about the same age, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a live performance of it since. The people we saw were very powerful, and seeing how they work through the subtleties of the text was quite wonderful. It might be cool to try something like with my First Year Seminar students and an old folk song if I didn’t think they’d shoot me :-).