Shakespeare the survivor

I went and saw the movie version of Twelfth Night a couple of weeks ago - it's a recording of the 2017 production at the National Theatre in London. The movie version is bit of an oddity: there's a 20-minute interval around the two-hour mark, when nothing appears on the screen except a counting down clock; we can still hear the sound of the audience in the real theatre. The last time I saw a similar production - it was the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Love's Labour's Lost - they went backstage during the interval as well as showing how the set had been constructed and a number of other interesting facts.

This version gave us some of that at the beginning, but it gave us more: a run-down on the fact that the director and some of the cast saw this play as timely because of its 'gender fluidity'. Thus we were regaled with little speeches about the way Shakespeare was so ahead of his time in playing around with gender (boys becoming girls becoming boys and so on), and watched a queer activist talk about how the audience would probably find the play bringing out more of their unannounced gay side. (My paraphrase.) All this unnecessary stuff almost turned me off staying for the play.

Of course Twelfth Night is about boys pretending to be girls pretending to be boys. Shakespeare is playing with all this, not turning the play into some ideological statement. But this version of the play takes everything as far as it's possible to go: thus Orsino kisses his 'boy' (who's actually a girl); any of Antonio's speeches in which the word 'love' occurs are given huge emphasis, as though Antonio was madly in love with Sebastian; even Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek seem to do some odd touching up at one point. And Malvolio, Feste and Fabian are all played by women. This sort of works with Feste and Fabian, but Malvolio is turned into a Puritan lesbian, Malvolia, and, when she comes out, as it were, after receiving the famous fake letter, she's gone into cabaret, it seems. And talking of cabaret, at the Elephant Inn, a possibly transvestite singer is the entertainment (singing, curiously, a version of Hamlet's To be or not to be speech).

Does anything of this add to the play? (Does any of the crotch-grabbing or male genital-focusing add anything either? Thankfully, this is mostly in the first few scenes, and lessens after that.) I'm not convinced that it does. It does give Tamsin Greig the opportunity to play the plum role of Malvolio/a and to play it so utterly and thoroughly that she quickly upstages the rest of the cast. Viola, the main character, is reduced considerably in status as a result. Greig is wonderful in the part, hilarious, crazy, absurd, taking every word of the script and giving it all possible meaning, and even jumping into an actual fountain and getting herself thoroughly soaked at one point. But note that it's the comedy that shines through here, not the fact that it's a woman playing the role.

Aside from all this, Toby Belch isn't fat, and Aguecheek isn't thin. In fact, Belch is presented as a thoroughly unpleasant character. It's always hard to see him as humorous: he's selfish, vile, generally drunk, and nasty to his friends. Why does Maria decide to marry him? Who knows? She's a lot sharper than he is. Maybe the problem is that Maria is never played as unpleasant; she's always been a warm character in any version I've seen. What if she and Belch were cast as the Thenardiers of this particular court? That might make more sense in regard to what they do to Malvolio/a.

Daniel Rigby plays Aguecheek as wonderfully daft, doing lots of ridiculous gymnastics, enjoying himself and his lines, and generally coming across as a much warmer Aguecheek than usual. He doesn't deserve the Belch of this production - Tim McMullan - who's almost entirely venal. Not the person you want to get on the wrong side of. It's not surprising that he's given the brush-off by Aguecheek at the end.

Phoebe Fox is an excellent and lively Olivia: she swings from grief to anger to fire to passion to humour and warmth and back again with ease, and makes a character we can warm to.

Another star of the show, it might said, is the set: a huge staircase that's on some kind of turntable, and presents itself variously as the ship in the storm, a place for the musicians to loll about on, and the wall of a street. When it splits open we can be in Olivia's court, or Orsino's; we can be in the garden with a working fountain or a patio with a pool (real water in it as well). Sometimes it takes off at the end of a scene and leaves the characters behind, or sweeps them up somehow. It's a wonderful concept, and works marvellously.

The musicians are another feature of this production. At least two of them play more than one instrument, and they're an integral part of what's going on, not just filler between scenes.

So there was a great deal to enjoy here. The ideology, however, just seemed to get in the way, for me. I understand Shakespeare has been regarded for centuries as a playwright you can do what you will with (pun intended), and over the decades we've had all sorts of theories and viewpoints added into the mix of his plays. Somehow he survives it all. Thankfully.

Learning lines, and memorizing

I've mentioned recently that I was playing a part in the play Hamp, put on by Stageworks in Dunedin at the Playhouse.

With this play, and the one I did last year - The Sunshine Boys - I found something curious had happened to my learning of lines. In previous plays I've had to work endlessly hard to retain the lines, and even then not felt very secure. But with these two plays, once the lines have been learned, they're secure, and only a distraction (such as happened one night during Hamp) puts me off saying the right thing in the right place.

This is curious, because by rights, you'd think, being now at an exalted age, it ought to be harder for me to learn lines. And I'm not aware that I've changed my approach to learning them, except in one respect: I work through them one at a time until I can do a page or so of them from memory. Then I read the cue from the other actor, (either out loud or in my head) and (with my line covered up) recite my own line.

I learned the lines for Sunshine Boys very quickly with this 'method' last year, and the lines for Hamp came pretty quickly too, although, as always, there were one or two that remained sticky until late in the proceedings. But I didn't feel perturbed about that. I knew they'd come.

So maybe it's just a gain in confidence. Seems unlikely; I've been reasonably confident on stage these last ten years or so.

I do insist on one thing: that the lines are learned as they're written. If this isn't done, it's too easy to veer off course. You'd think that all actors (amateur actors, I'm talking about here) would learn the lines that the author gives them, but some don't. They have a tendency to partly learn them, and then, of course, they find themselves in trouble on stage, and have to paraphrase. The mind has the extraordinary ability to paraphrase, to substitute words with similar meanings, if we get into any trouble. But I prefer not to rely on that, and it's not ideal. It can be off-putting for other actors waiting on a particular cue.

Anyway, that's one aspect of memorisation. The other is that the only other thing I've really memorised over the last year or so is Psalm 119, that great hulk of a work with 176 verses, and a huge amount of similar lines. With this Psalm I had to use all the techniques I could think of to hold it together in my head. I got it to the point where I could recite it through, last year, left it alone for a while, and have been revising it this year, reinforcing things, and checking that I'm actually saying the right words in the right places.

The interesting thing is that even though I'd left it alone for a few months, the basic structural approach I'd taken to learning it survived, and kept the piece mostly in my head. Some details had wandered, and had to be pulled back into line, but having done that, the thing is once again on a secure footing. Furthermore, I'm now able to get past the techniques and listen to the words themselves, something that was quite hard to do when I was learning it.

A few days ago I wrote myself a note: now is not the time to give up memorising. I've memorised Scripture and poetry for years, mostly during the half hour walk I took to work in the mornings. But I haven't revised a lot of that material for some time, and the other day I felt it was time to put the revision work in and get some of those things back into my system.

I started with Hebrews chapter 12, something I learned many years ago. To my surprise, it was basically still intact, once I'd run through it a few times; the lines that had seemed hard to get under my belt all those years ago came back without too much effort, and already I'm feeling as though it's well within my grasp again.

The joy of memorising things is that you really get to know them. We can read something over and over and still find that we skim bits, or ignore some things. Once you start to memorise, you have to learn every word, and learn it right. This does something very good for the soul...

Hamp over and done

The Stageworks production of the play, Hamp, is now over and done with, and I've wound up with a cold. Not the only actor, apparently; a combination of tiredness and a cold theatre (or at least cold on the stage itself) didn't help.
It's an odd play, as I noted in my last post, and I don't know that any of the actors felt they completely got to grips with it. Perhaps more rehearsal time and discussion about the characters might have helped, but we were constrained by a short rehearsal period, and so had to do our best with the time we had.
The audiences 'enjoyed' it. I put enjoyed in quotes because it's not a play you enjoy; you kind of endure it, because it's pretty obvious from early on that things aren't going to go well for the main character. It's a bit like how you feel about Hamlet. No matter how many times you see it, he's never going to come out alive.
I mentioned the following incident on Facebook, I think: one lady couldn't bear to watch it to the end and left her husband in the audience while she went out and sat in the car. 'That poor young man!' she told one of front of house people. There were tears from other audience members, and gasps each night when Hamp basically opens his mouth at one crucial point in the court martial, and lands himself in the poo.
One man, however, only got to the end of the first act: 'Not my sort of thing. Boring.' He'd already muttered all the way through the act, and would have been in line to be throttled by the cast if he'd carried on any longer. The first act is a long conversation between Hamp and his defending counsel - there are only occasional interruptions from other minor characters. It's the sort of scene that requires top notch intensity, because there's no real conflict between the two characters, not much for them to get their teeth into. But that's the way the author's written it...
The cast consisted of young actors, in their early twenties, and a bunch of older actors - apart from two guys who came in somewhere in the middle. As a group we got on well; there was no sense that the youngsters avoided the oldies. It's strange to think that in thirty or forty years time, if these young actors remember acting in the play, the older actors will have long been forgotten. It's unlikely any of us will live to be a hundred or more!

Members of the cast in the court martial scene:
Rob Hart as Prescott, Lindsay Smith as the Midgely, the prosecutor, Elliot Phillips as Hamp, Craig Storey as the Guard, Rob Monzari (at back) as the Corporal, and Brian Kilkelly as Hargreaves, the defending counsel.
Photo courtesy of Ian Thomson

Different viewpoints

We had the opening night of Hamp at the Playhouse in Dunedin last night. There was a very appreciative audience who were obviously deeply engrossed in the play: we hardly heard a sound out of them all night, except for the occasional chuckle at one or two of the lines. I was interested in particular to see that no one laughed at the part of the play where Hamp collapses (too much rum) during the communion service. Plainly my concerns that people might find this funny were unfounded.

In fact, my perceptions, from the inside of the play, are obviously quite different to the way in which people see the play, as a whole, from the outside. My character, the Padre, opens the second act, under cross-examination from the prosecutor at Hamp's court martial, and then vanishes for the rest of the act, only to turn up as an important character in the third act. A number of the actors, in fact, only appear in the second act.

This has given me, as an actor, a slightly dislocated feeling in terms of the rest of the play. Of course I've seen the first act in rehearsal, and last night listened to it again on the Tannoy system that lets those backstage hear what's going on onstage, but because I have no connection with this part, I have to come onstage cold at the beginning of the second act, when several of the other actors have already been well warmed-up for an hour.

It's rather like being a bit-player in a movie: you turn up for your couple of day's shooting without having experience anything of what the other actors have been involved in. Not that I'm complaining: I'm quite content with the role because it's actually an interesting part - and I don't have anywhere near as many lines to learn as I did in Sunshine Boys!

I just have to understand that what the audience sees isn't what I see, and that the author of the play, John Wilson, knew what he was doing.

Playing the Padre

I've been rehearsing the play, Hamp, over the last few weeks. It's a Stageworks production, and performances begin next Wednesday (the 13th, August).
I'm playing the otherwise unnamed 'Padre'. He doesn't appear until the beginning of the second act, when the court martial of the title character takes place. He has three pages of dialogue at that point with the prosecuting counsel, and then vanishes again until the third act, when he comes into his own.
He's a no-nonsense character, has a true Christian faith, but is deeply troubled by the events taking place around him: not just the War itself, but the particular problems relating to Hamp's trial. His anger rises to the surface quickly, and often, because he's forever having to face men who treat other men too casually, and who regard Army rules as of more value than human life. It's a difficult part to play, but rewarding.

Atonement

We watched the movie, Atonement, two or three years ago, but I'd never read the book.  I thought the movie was very well done, and its surprise ending came as quite a shock. Don't read this next bit if you haven't seen the movie or read the book: it'll spoil it. But it turns out that the book we've been reading is, to all intents and purposes, the creation of one of the characters within the story; at the end she not only reveals this but also tells us how she changed the events to make them more palatable to the reader, and also to atone for her behaviour as a 13-year-old, when she all but destroyed the lives of her sister and her sister's lover.

While we were in Auckland, I discovered the book of Atonement on our friend's shelf, and began to read it, bringing it home with me to finish.  Knowing how the story played out and how it ended perhaps spoiled it to a degree for me, but the book was still well worth reading. Ian McEwan writes so wonderfully throughout that you turn page after page even after the main story has ended - about two-thirds of the way through - and the three kind of follow-up episodes take place. Structurally, you might say that the first two-thirds of the book is strongly plotted and the other three sections are quite discursive, although the last section ties up some loose ends. The long sequence when Robbie is heading towards Dunkirk with two other soldiers is gripping only because of the detail; there's little forward movement, in a sense. Briony's story of being a probationer-nurse is equally enthralling, but again, until the very end, doesn't move things forward much, except to give us a hint that what we're reading may be not quite what we think it is.  Briony gets the last word, in the last section, where she reveals what the book has been about. By this time a number of the characters have died (either of old age, or accident) and the party for Briony's birthday includes the long-lost play that she wrote as a child, and which was to have been performed on the fateful day that takes up so much of the first part of the book.

The first part of the book is impressionistic, full of wonderful portrayed detail, superbly delineated characterisations, and much more. Yet in spite of its impressionistic feel, this is where the nitty-gritty of the novel takes place.  There is much more grit and graphic detail in section two and three, but in the end they don't seem to add much to the story, although they create a dark and fearsome world where people are dying horrible deaths as a result of the War.  It's interesting that though the Dunkirk sequence was given quite a bit of room in the movie, Briony's time as a trainee nurse was reduced considerably, and the last sequence, in which - as an old woman - she reveals what truly went on, is given only a few minutes of screen time, but more than enough to bring the movie to a satisfactory conclusion.  Dramatically, the movie makes a very good fist of the book.  Its only indulgence is the long tracking shot of the beach near Dunkirk, an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, but not actually relevant to the story.

I've never read any of McEwan before, and since this book is touted as his masterpiece, I'm not sure what I'd read else that wouldn't come across as a lesser book.  No doubt there are excellent things in his other books...time will tell.

Round up of the week

I keep thinking it's Saturday.  In fact, it's Friday.  (Well, it's actually Thursday for a great many people in the world, but we won't go into that.)  I don't know why I keep thinking it's Saturday: perhaps it's because it's the first day this week when I haven't been committed to do something specific, something that takes up enough of the day to make it feel as though I'm actually busy.  (I am, but we won't go into that either.)

Monday I accompanied Arnold Bachop at Les Cleveland's funeral, at First Church.  I hadn't seen much of Les in recent years, but when I was younger we had a good deal to do with each other when he was singing in various shows I was involved in.  His extraordinary buoyancy and delight in life was spoken of again and again, and when someone said that they heard him climbing up the steps into a plane and saying, And how are you, my fine friend, that old Cleveland vibrant bass came back to me instantly.  I've been addressed as his fine friend on a number of occasions, as no doubt has half of Dunedin.  What an extraordinary larger-than-life personality he was.  How it makes you feel that your own funeral is going to be a bit of a non-affair!

Normally on Monday afternoon I'd have been working with the Choristers, a group of elderly ladies who sing and give the occasional concerts at old people's homes. But we had to cancel this week's practice because of the funeral.

Tuesday we went to see Social Welfare to sort out the money we've made in the last financial year over and above what we're allowed to earn on top of the pension.  That was a bit stressful, even though we were pretty sure of the outcome.  It didn't take up a great deal of the day; nevertheless, it used up a good deal of our emotional energy, I suspect. 

Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday: in the evenings I've been rehearsing The Sunshine Boys, along with various members of the cast.  Some scenes are going very well; one that was going well fell over on Thursday, for no accountable reason.

Wednesday I met up with one of the members of the church's youth group, for lunch, and then went on to do some data input for the church office, only to find that some of the input I'd put in last time had gone AWOL and had to be put back in, and that after I'd input the recent data, I was left with $2.00 out.  Very annoying, and I couldn't solve it at the time.  Will have to have another look.

Thursday, I played for Arnold again, and for Peter Chin, also an old friend, and up until fairly recently, the Mayor of Dunedin.  (Oh, I walk in exalted circles, I can tell you.)  This time we were at the Senior Citizens afternoon that's held (I think) once a week in South Dunedin.  A pretty cold day, so most of the Senior Citizens wisely stayed home, and our audience was less than twenty.  Never mind, it was a cheery concert and we all enjoyed ourselves. 

And so to today, where the only thing I had to do was give one of my granddaughters a piano lesson.  That wasn't until late this afternoon, so the rest of the day was free. I spent some time brushing up on my lines for the play, particularly the scene that had gone awry last night, and sending off three flash fiction stories to an NZ contest that closes at the end of the month (I'd written all three of them earlier in the month, but tidied them up today).  Did some more Arabic with my wife, took the dog for a walk, and generally potted around. Or so it seemed. I kept feeling all day that there was something I should have been doing, but whatever it was it didn't eventuate.

Watched another episode of Trial and Retribution, a series Lynda La Plante initiated back in the late nineties. At that time there was only one episode a year, and they were great massive three-hour jobs, usually spread over two nights. The later episodes (the series finished in 2009, I think) got shorter, and had less detail in them, which was a pity. Only two of the original actors made it through the whole series: David Hayman and Dorian Lough. They played two of the detectives in the series. 

The show originally featured a long police procedural section followed by a trial, in which sometimes all the police work was unravelled and the criminal got away.  However, in the later episodes, the trial section vanished almost completely (there was no trial whatsoever in the one we watched today - Ghost Train - for instance).  There have been two distinct features of the series: a split screen technique which will often throw different elements of the story together (apparenlty La Plante wasn't fussed about this idea), and a kind of dwelling on of the grotesque details of the person murdered.  Not only do we often get a glimpse of the deceased in all their gory glory, but the director will hark back to this several times during the show, so that all the hard work the make-up people have put in will get its due worth.  Some of what they do is too graphic to watch, we've found, and we just have to shut our eyes until they get onto the next part of the story.  Apart from that element, and La Plante's typical modus operandi of preferring female victims to male ones, females who are often badly abused by the males, the series makes gripping watching.  It's had a real run of wonderful British actors, and Hayman in particular has been a wonderful anchor for the show.

Just as a side issue for those who enjoy these things, the man who plays Miranda's boyfriend in the popular comedy series of the same name, Tom Ellis, was a murder victim in Season 11, which aired in February 2008.  Seemed a bit odd killing of someone we like so much in a different setting...

A different approach to learning lines

I've just been running through one of the bigger scenes in The Sunshine Boys with my wife reading in for the other character(s).  I'm very pleased to find that most of the lines are intact in that scene, as they are in the first scene.  So that's great progress.  There's only one other big scene to get to grips with, and some of it's already there.

I don't know whether it's a matter of experience but I'm finding it easier to remember the lines for this play than I have for practically every other play I've done.  In fact, I've been confident enough to put down the script quite early on and just see how much I can remember in the rehearsals.  I remember that in many of the previous plays I've done I've been quite anxious about this aspect of acting; it seemed as though as soon as I got hold of a line it would go, and then when I got hold of it throroughly it could still vanish when I needed it in a rehearsal.  In the past I've tended to aim to be able to work through all my lines without necessarily referring to the cues - I've known that the other actor(s) will be saying 'something' but I won't necessarily know what they're saying.  This isn't the best way.  It may seem to be a good thing to be able to go through all your lines in your head in order, but it doesn't hold up well when it comes to the actual performing. 

This time I started out in the usual fashion, even putting the other actors' lines on a recording and leaving room for me to fit mine in.  It worked, but only in a kind of fashion.  I reverted to the way I'd started out learning these lines: holding a bit of paper over the line and reading the other character's cue.  Then I'd attempt to say my own line.  To my surprise this has worked far better than I expected.  I can't comfortably run through every one of my lines in order, the way I've done in the past, but when the cue comes I know what my line is. That's an odd thing: it's encouraging and yet it's not at all like I've worked in the past.  It creates much less anxiety because I'm not relying on myself to remember everything, but on the other actor's cues to act as a prompt.

Now the thing is, I'm not learning the other actor's lines; that would be more than I need to do. But reading them frequently while following up with my own, I find that I've got enough of a handle on their line to be confident to know what comes next.  The trick is, of course, that the other actor has to be as confident of his lines as I am of mine.  Many of the scenes in this play have just two actors on stage - so it's a business of bouncing the ball back and forward between you.  If one of you drops the ball, of course, it makes it tricky, but usually you find you have a pretty good idea what's coming next, and you can ad lib to help the other actor get back on track.

The memory is a fascinating thing.  I've spent years attempting all sorts of techniques and tricks to help me remember things, and yet here I'm relying greatly on an outside source - the other actor - to become my memory prompt.  It's most intriguing, and feels like something of a breakthrough. 

The Sunshine Boys

I've been offered a part in the Repertory Society's coming production of The Sunshine Boys, a play by Neil Simon.  I'd heard this was in the offing three or four weeks ago, and got a copy of the play to read.  It's very funny, sometimes in a kind of aggressive way, and the three main characters are great to play.  I'm doing Al, who doesn't appear till the second scene. He's the bête noire of the main character, who's being played by Bert Nisbet.  Bert's character is onstage for a great deal of the play - even when he's not onstage, he has lines that he has to fit in from offstage.  I'm relieved that I have several sections of the play when I get a break - and time to cram up on my next lot of lines, no doubt! 

Apropos of this, I've been memorising Psalm 119 over the last few weeks - it's a slow process, because there isn't a kind of narrative flow to the psalm.  The sometimes seemingly random statements - which use the same words over and over in different ways - don't easily connect to one another in the brain, so you have to have all sorts of links to keep track of things.  The part in the play is a piece of cake to learn by contrast with Psalm 119, so in a way I've been doing some mental exercises in preparation.  However, it's also the longest part I've ever learnt, I think, and will be kind of tough to deal with.

I was in a play last week on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first missionary to leave New Zealand from the Baptist Mission Society.  I had only around twenty-five lines in the play all up, and for once I was word-perfect.  My aim is to be word-perfect in this play too, because I feel that if you don't get the words right, not only does it do a disservice to the author, but it also makes it harder to remember whether you've got the line quite in its proper shape.  The brain delights in muddling those who don't learn things exactly (it can muddle those who do know things exactly).  It may seem picky to want to learn the thing perfectly, but I know from experience that if I don't I'll have trouble at some point in the performances.

Busy weekend and Tangled

We've nearly finished painting the house: Saturday was a big day, with one of our sons also giving us a hand to do a couple of bits we didn't fancy trying to tackle - too far off the ground! Today, with the heavy rain, we won't be doing anything, and yesterday, being Sunday, we had a day off.  Well, sort of: I was at church in the morning, at a read-through for a play at 2 pm, and at the first practice of the year for the choir Sunny Side Up at 4 pm.  So not quite what you'd call a quiet day.  Plus we talked to our son in the States on Skype around 1 pm, and caught up with what's been going on with him.  So perhaps it's just as well it's raining today!  I might get time to breathe.  (Might also have to swap my shorts for long trousers for the first time since early January - it's been so hot this last month, I've hardly been out of shorts since I had to buy a pair in Christchurch just after New Year.)

The play we're doing is about the woman, Rosalie Macgeorge, who was the first Baptist missionary sent out from New Zealand, back in the 1880s.  It's been written by one of our congregation as part of the celebrations for the 150th Anniversary of the church, which is happening this year at Easter Weekend.  I've got a couple of small roles in it, one as a bumptious minister and the other as the doctor who has to tell Rosalie that if she doesn't leave India soon she'll die from her ill-health.  There are twenty or more in the cast, most of us taking more than one role.

Last night my daughter reminded me that the animated movie, Tangled, was on and that I might like to watch it.  I'd heard it was a bit quirky, and certainly it lived up to its reputation.  Rapunzel has been imprisoned by a woman who isn't her mother for years - not to protect her from the big bad world, as the mother claims, but so the pseudo-mother can keep Rapunzel's hair (which has magical properties) under her control.  The male romantic lead, who unwillingly rescues Rapunzel, is a young man who's fallen into a life of crime as a result of being an orphan, and who has based his personality on the heroic character Flynn Rider whom he read about in his childhood.  He has quite a bit of growing up to do - as has Rapunzel, especially as her main reaction to any stranger is to thump them with a frying pan.  There's a horse, Maximus, who seems to think he's also a dog, and a variety of crims who all have a dream - as we discover in a riotous song and dance in a tavern.   The story is probably a fair way away from the Grimm Brothers version, but that's never stopped Disney and Co using one of their fairy tales as a springboard for whatever works in the 20th or 21st centuries.

Talking of movies, Our TV stands on a cabinet that was intended to hold videos.  Remember videos?  You can't give 'em away now - except to op shops.  We sent a pile to one of the town's op shops a while ago.  Obviously there are still people out there who watch movies on video, but they must be getting fewer and fewer.  I think we need to clean out our few remaining ones before it's too late.  Now that painting is nearly done, it might be time for another patch of de-cluttering around the house.  I'm noticing more and more books that I've finally decided I can live without.  The bookshelves might start to look bare...!

On Ceilings

I briefly mentioned Nora Ephron in my last post, and was looking back in my Evernote clippings and noted that the article from The Guardian on her mentions 'ceilings'.  She was addressing her Alma Mater at the time:  "Don't let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you – there's still a glass ceiling. Don't let the number of women in the workforce trick you – there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents..."  I like that last bit because I came across an article on the Net yesterday suggesting the use of sheets of bubble-wrap as an insulator on windows.  In spite of the fact that we've actually insulated the house recently, under the floor and in the ceilings, the last few days have been particularly cold.  The heat pump has been working overtime, which doesn't bode well for the power bill, and it's still been less than comfortable in some living areas in the house.  I'm getting old, so the cold obviously affects me more than it used to, but...

Anyway, I don't know that we'll be putting bubble-wrap up on the windows at this point, though it may come to that in due course.  This morning I've left the curtains shut in two of the living areas to try and keep some heat in.  

When we were in Idaho at the beginning of the year, in what was their winter (it turned out to be more like our winter, which is often relatively mild), the house had a ceiling fan that spread the heat around the main (large) living area.  I guess that would help here too - it might stop the heat sitting up at ceiling level and keeping our feet cold.  Casablanca ceiling fans are one kind of model [see example to the right] but I'm sure there are others.

Amongst my clippings is a poem The Hinge Seasons, by Therese Lloyd.  It was highly commended in this year's Caselberg Awards.  Here's a 'ceiling' quote from the last few lines:

alive to the simple generosity
of that saucer of rainwater
sending up light to the ceiling.

Here's a line from the prospectus for the old cinema that became the London Opera Centre, where I did a year's course back in the sixties: Auditorium with rich Art Deco plaster work to walls, ceiling and proscenium; side walls include large panels of delicate ornamental grillwork and original lights. Large, enriched 3-tier ceiling fitting providing illumination and air conditioning outlets.

The cinema was built in the days when cinemas were next to palaces in design, though by the time I got there it had had additional rooms built in and walls shifted and all manner of odd redesigning done to it.  

Here's Seth Godin talking about the pricing of ebooks: Certainly less than $20 (a ‘moral’ ceiling related to the price of a paper copy) and probably more than $10 (which is the floor set by Amazon as the price of a bestseller on the Kindle).  He's not talking about 'ordinary' ebooks, but books with a 'provenance.'   Sometimes Godin strikes me as a bit of a snob, especially when it comes to the marketing of his own materials.  Anyway a 'moral ceiling' is a nice concept. 

Back in November 2011, there was an article in The Guardian (yes, I know I quote them a lot) about an overzealous cleaner unintentionally destroying an artwork called When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling.[See right]  She mistook it for an eyesore that was badly in need of a clean.   Enough said, I think. 

In the light of what directors can do to a play, check out this extract from an article on modern theatre productions: Before I went I’d been warned by my agent, by at least two other writers and by one literary manager that I would hate it. They’ll wrap all the actors in cling film and swing them from the ceiling on meat hooks, take out all your text and add in new text by Michel Houellebecq they suggested to me. They were wrong.

Sebastian’s production blew my mind.

Simon Stephens goes on to say what they did do with the play - and he approved of it - but I'm not sure that every playwright has had such an enlightening experience with their work.  

And finally, an extract from a blog post by Jason Goroncy, in which the ideas of ceiling are introduced in relation to theology: When we enter a cathedral and we look up at the majestically-high ceiling, we are reminded that God is big, that God is far away, and that we are small. But in our modern multi-purpose entertainment centres, the ceiling feels almost within reach, and God is not so big, and we are not so small. This reflects a change in theology – both in our thinking about God and about ourselves. God used to be bigger and we used to smaller. But now God is not so big, and we are not so small! Or so modernity’s narrative goes.

Juno and the Paycock

Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is one of those plays you hear about but don't really see any more.   It was a huge hit when it was first produced way back in 1924, and within six years Alfred Hitchcock was given the task of directing the film version.  Unusually, (perhaps restricted by the contract he was then under) he stuck to the original script to a great extent, only opening out the one setting in the play occasionally, notably at the beginning, when Barry Fitzgerald (who played the Paycock in the original stage production) is seen briefly as a rabble-rouser.  

I've just watched the movie online - the copy is a little erratic: it sometimes cuts the tops of people's heads off, and in some shots it looks like it's not centred properly.  All that aside, it's great to see a top-flight cast giving this classic play all they've got.

The play doesn't entirely translate well to the screen: as it shifts increasingly from semi-farce to tragedy, the transition seems a bit over the top.  Perhaps in the theatre Juno's last speeches would be more effective.  On screen they don't quite work - for me.  It's not that we haven't been warned that tragedy is on the way: the son, Johnny, is a perpetual dark cloud in the background of the comedy scenes, but the other two disasters (daughter Mary's out of wedlock pregnancy, and the loss of the inheritance they'd all been banking on) seem just a little forced.  We can appreciate what O'Casey is doing without actually feeling as emotional about it as he intends.  This may, of course, be caused by the play being almost 100 years old, but I think it's more that some of the intensity that a theatrical performance would give is lost in the cinematic version.

What works best now is the superb comedy that the principals indulge in, especially the so-called Captain (the 'peacock' of the title) and Joxer, his drinking partner.  These two are played by Edward Chapman, an established stage actor in his first screen role, and Sydney Morgan, another stage actor who seldom appeared on screen, but directed a great many movies.  They're a wonderful team, and the detail in their characters is a delight.  Sara Allgood was also a stage actress, having worked in the famed Abbey Theatre, and having originated the part of Juno on stage.  Along with Chapman she appeared in at least one other Hitchcock movie.  She has the difficult role of being the mainstay of a somewhat erratic family, and being made representative by O'Casey of much more than just her matriarchal status.  John Laurie (a Scotsman), who plays the son, Johnny,  made a bigger impression in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, a few years later.   Here he has little to do except for occasional outbursts; most of the time he's in the background of scenes, burning with a kind of gloomy intensity.  His big moment at the end doesn't quite come off, for me, but again it's the sort of role that might be more effective in the theatre.

Hitchcock brings his talent for comedy to light here throughout the movie, but the main scene in which he and the actors revel in O'Casey's script is when they're celebrating (along with the local barmaid, Mrs Madigan (Maire O'Neill, who played the part of Juno in a 1938 TV production) their new-found fortune.  There's huge comedy over drinks drunk too quickly and within the singing that takes place, and the interruptions of the long rambling stories Mrs Madigan indulges in.  This kind of comedy appears in a number of Hitchcock's films, especially those made up until the 50s, where a bunch of British actors would have delightful group scenes in which detailed characterisation was to the fore.  While comedy was almost always a part of Hitchcock's movies, the later films tend to sprinkle it more thinly.

Incidentally, on the imdb site, Chapman, who's the father of the family, is listed as only being 29 when he made the movie, which makes him younger than Laurie, who plays his adult son.  I think there may be an error somewhere, or else he manages to look (and act) considerably older than he actually is.

I also caught up on a short propaganda film Hitchcock made during the war, Bon Voyage.  This is a curiosity: it's made in French, with even the English characters speaking French (although one of them keeps on going on about the way his French is affected by his Scots accent).  It's about a young RAF man who's 'rescued' from France and sent home courtesy of the Resistance.  Except it isn't the Resistance but a German spy posing as a Resistance man.  As the story is retold (after our initial viewing of it) we discover that the spy is systematically killing off the Resistance people who are involved in the story without the hero's knowledge, and has used the hero to take an important piece of information to Britain.  A good deal of the story is told in dialogue rather than action, which is perhaps an indication of the frugality of the budget.  Nevertheless, it's well enough done, and worth catching up with if you're a Hitchcock buff.

Red, and Rothko

I went to see the pensioner, John Bach, in John Logan's play Red last night, at the Fortune Theatre.  I mention Bach's age only because I see that he's just one year younger than me.  The physical and mental challenge of his role in Red would be a challenge to any actor, let alone someone who's verging on 66.

Red would have to be one of the best plays I've seen at the Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, not just because the play itself is great, but because of the energy and focus and interplay between the two actors who inhabit the stage for the entire ninety minutes duration.  Neither of them gets more than a minute's break.  The other actor, the much younger Cameron Douglas, is more than a match for Bach's many years of experience in the theatre, movies and television.  He has the advantage, perhaps, of playing someone close to his own age, so can identify with the young man's thinking and behaviour.  Nevertheless, the role requires considerable work, and never lets him off lightly.

Red explores everything that can occur between two artists of different ages: experience, philosophy, the old giving way to the new, the thought of death when life seems abundant, the contemplative versus the active, the selling-out of the soul; whether art is for all time or merely to be hung on the walls of an expensive restaurant - and ignored.  And why we should produce art at all...

There are wonderful moments of confrontation, with either one or other of the actors going full blast at his counterpart.  There are some wonderful moments when a mere look changes how you feel about one of the actors.  There are sudden moments of humour.  And there are sections of deep emotion, especially when the young man, known only as Ken (and never actually called by name during the play, as far as I can recall) gradually reveals the horror of the day he woke up to find his parents had been murdered in their beds.

Rothko, by contrast, barely mentions his past: he throws off a horror moment in his own life as something he's not sure whether he actually remembers or has just been told about.  His Jewish name has been discarded long before.  We know nothing about his private life outside the studio, so it's ironic that Ken angrily tells him at one point that Rothko knows nothing about his life outside the studio, and isn't interested in finding out.  The two men exist inside the room.  We know of only two other characters: both of them are spoken to on the telephone (which never rings), and the first of these, the one Ken is conversing with briefly in one scene, is anonymous.

And the room is wonderful: it threatens to spill out into the audience; it's untidy, yet it's always being tidied; its walls are covered with paintings from the series of murals Rothko is painting (or canvases in various states of preparation) - and there's another one we never see that's hanging on the 'fourth wall'.  The sink down in one corner is the sort of sink you see in a mechanic's workshop: except that this one is covered in paint that will no longer wash off.  In that curious and slightly unusable space that the Fortune is 'blessed' with (to the audience's left) there are shelves stuffed with items that are ignored, forgotten.  There are high windows way above the reach of the actors through which light barely penetrates (Rothko doesn't like natural light); there is pale ceiling lighting in the room, and there are lamps that shine throughout one or two scenes on the enormous prepared canvas at the back of the stage, a canvas that the actors actually prepare in tandem at one point, working under and over and in front and behind each other in a passionate and energetic sloshing on of yet more red paint.  No doubt Peter King, the set designer, had ideas from other productions of the play to work from, but he's converted the Fortune stage into something that no longer seems a stage, and done it marvellously.  

The play is based on events in Rothko's life though the character of Ken is fictional.  

The Truth Game

Went to Simon Cunliffe's play, The Truth Game, last night.   House wasn't very full, which was a bit of a surprise, since the play has had very good reviews, and it's new, and it's locally-written (Cunliffe works for the Otago Daily Times, which has sponsored the play, and also provided, no doubt, the mountains of newspapers that litter the stage and the foyer, and which the Fortune is going to have to recycle at the end of the season on Saturday).

The play has an excellent cast: Greg Johnson, Peter Hayden, Phil Vaughan, Michele Amas, Anna Henare and Kathleen Burns - more on them later - and a striking set designed by Matt Best.   At first it looked as though the giant screen that dominates the stage (and is used by Belinda as a PowerPoint) is going to clutter up things.  In fact, its screen is made up of modern-style Venetian blinds (I'm sure they have their own proper name) and these open up completely to reveal an office within the larger office that takes up the rest of the stage.  


The play is basically about the conflict that's going on in the newspaper world between old hacks like the rough-edged Frank Stone (note the name) and his even older confederate Ralph (pronounced Rafe, as he carefully explains to the newbie journalist), and the New Media people who think running a newspaper is all about making money (which of course it is, but news comes into it too - real news, as Frank insists again and again), and the up-and-coming generation who can find reports and articles and tweets and blogs at the drop of a hat.   No one wins - not in this play - and probably the competition is going to go on for a long time yet.   


Frank may be rough-edged, but he's a very good editor and organiser - when the big story comes at the end of the first act, he's onto it in a flash.  Frank is played by Greg Johnson - he was the irascible hostel manager in the movie, The Insatiable Moon.   This is a somewhat similar character: a man who's hard-nosed, but has considerable integrity.  A man who shouts at this clientele, but loves them dearly.   A man with mistakes in his past (as the sub-plot brings to light - a sub-plot that's interesting, but not quite in line with the play as a whole; still, it provides variety.  By the way, that use of a semi-colon there is much denigrated at one point in the play, along with a number of other woolly-liberal kinds of punctuation - the end-dash, for one.)


Peter Hayden plays Ralph.  Hayden has had a long and successful career both as an actor and also as one of the men at the forefront of the Natural History documentary unit here in Dunedin.   In this play, Ralph is a little fragile, past retirement age, but still living in a world where he is safe and snug doing what he's always done.   Hayden provides a quiet foil to the noise that goes around him (he writes with large earphones on), and provides some of the more amusing moments with his didactic approach to grammar.  Ralph spends his days puttering around doing the editorial (I always thought the leader was done by the Editor, says Jo, the newbie), pulling together stuff from his forty plus years of experience of writing, and also writing the wine column (a somewhat less-than-journalistic occupation in the eyes of some of the others). 


Phil Vaughan is the fussy little manager; he still has a bit of journalism in his blood, but mostly its been diluted by the need to make money, please the Head Office and so on.  The arm-wrestling he and Frank do at one point may be a bit odd, but it's significant in terms of their relationship.   Anna Henare (a Fortune Theatre regular) is the up-and-coming editor, an able journalist, still with integrity, and still soft, but heading - it seems - towards being as hard-nosed as Frank has become.   She's Frank's current lover, but journalism and truth keep getting in the road.  


Michelle Amas (who's a poet as well as an actor) is the brittle Belinda.  She opens the play with an almost-too-long seminar 'talk' to an Australian conference (Frank is there, and walks out in disgust).   The least likeable character in the play, Amas still manages to give her some warmth - though never too much.  Kathleen Burns is the youngest character in the play (meant to be a late teenager, I'd think, while Burns is around 25), and the one with all the Internet skills.   Burns has a bit of a difficult role: her character, Jo, brings humour to the play, is meant to be a little gauche but also better-read than her years would indicate, and struggles with the interplay between the other characters.    At times I felt Burns was acting the part rather than giving it to us direct; some of her moves had the air of being there to add character, rather than coming out of the character itself.   This may be intentional on the director's part (Lara McGregor, who's done a superb job overall - she's also the Fortune's new artistic director) but at times it just didn't seem quite on a par with the other actors' work.   Nevertheless, Burns is well-integrated into the cast, and my quibble is minor.  

All in all, not only has this play been well worth putting on - and I'd hope there are other companies around the country who'll pick it up - but it's perhaps the best thing I've seen at the Fortune in a long time.  Though that may not mean much as my attendance at the Fortune is pretty irregular!

Watch out...

My character in The Mousetrap is called Mr Paravicini....I'll write more about him once the play is over, perhaps, but he's a 'man of mystery', as he admits, early in the piece.   And when he asks what people know of him, his own answer is, 'Nothing at all.'   A lot of this is intentional misleading on his part, of course.  He doesn't want people to know what he's up to.

There's a suspicion late in the play that he's into stolen goods; one of the other characters even claims to know that he has watches hidden in the spare tyre of his Rolls Royce.   Pure speculation.   Mr Paravicini never gives anything like a hint that that's what he's up to, though he does tease Sergeant Trotter at one point by saying that 'he plays the markets'.  Trotter assumes he means the stock markets.  Paravicini just says 'you misunderstand me.'

Back in the fifties, when the play is set, I'm not sure what watches he might or might not be hiding in his spare wheel.   (Seems an odd place to put them, to me.)    These days, if he really was a black marketeer, he might be filling up his spare tyre with mens diamond watches of this kind shown in the picture.  That one's worth a cool US$2,000.   In which case, Mr Paravicini would have no trouble paying his bill at the guest house he drops into on a very snowy night....

Learning lines

I've been thinking again about the process of learning lines over the last few days.   A few months ago I bought a little digital dictaphone, and have been using that to assist in learning lines for the play, The Mousetrap (as I also did for the previous play I was in, Shadowlands).
 
I find that while I have a certain ability to listen and learn, I'm much better if I've seen where on the page the lines lie, and remember that as well.  Having that visual focus seems to make all the difference, especially when it comes to odd lines that are disconnected from any other dialogue I have.   It's the single lines that pop up without reference to anything else I've said that I find hardest to place, and often they're the last ones to be learnt.

When there's a chunk of dialogue with just one (or maybe two) other cast members, it's much easier to get a handle on the lines, because in a sense, I just reel them off down the 'page' in my head.   I get to a point where, with a sequence of lines, I can remember them almost as a single 'speech' - this helps, especially if the cues aren't quite right from the other person, or if they miss something out entirely.

The problem is, I think, that I don't tend to learn the cues for the odds lines well, because I don't particularly need to for the sequences of lines.   Plainly I need to do some work on this aspect of line-learning for future productions - if I do any more!

My mother said my father (whom I don't remember at all) had a photographic memory.  He was a top-class chess player in his day.   I don't think I have a photographic memory particularly, but I do have a 'picture' of where lines are on a page - this applies whether I'm learning a poem, or a piece of scripture, or lines for a play.   If I see the formation of them on the page my brain recalls them much better.  That picture seems to be part of the learned process, in fact.   So, while the dictaphone is very helpful, on its own it isn't enough.  Lines learnt in isolation, as it were, don't seem to stick nearly as well as lines learned with a visual clue attached. 

The photo is from the scene where my character, Paravicini, arrives and, in a somewhat theatrical fashion, informs the young couple running the guest house, that he is the 'man of mystery'.   Photo from the Cortland Repertory Theatre, Ithaca.

Rehearsing The Mousetrap

Rehearsals for Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap continue apace...the two late additions to the cast (the young man who stepped in to take over the role of Sergeant Trotter - Sam Irwin - and myself - replacing an actor who fell ill) are making great strides at catching up with the rest of the actors, who've been rehearsing for five or six weeks. 

The cast have rehearsed in a variety of venues, and on Tuesday have their first night in the theatre for a technical rehearsal...the set is being built that day too, and painted, so it may be an interesting occasion for all concerned!

Today (Sunday) we had a photo shoot down at the Railway Station, using some of the ready-made 'sets', and wandered around in our costumes, which entertained - and bewildered - some of the tourists.  

Five more days to opening.   Phew!

A role in The Mousetrap

Well, the last couple of days have had added to them the need to learn lines for The Mousetrap, which opens around the 24th of this month (or 24th inst, as a character in the play would put it).   For those who haven't caught up with what's happened, a person had to drop out of the cast due to illness, just last weekend, and so I've taken over his (thankfully fairly small) role.   The character is Paravicini, who may or may not be a fraud, and who - as he hints more than once - isn't quite what he appears. 

To my amazement you can get a 52-page study guide to The Mousetrap.   Crikey...the script is only 69 pages long as it is!  Let's hope they don't give away the denouement - it's traditional to ask the audience before the play starts not to do so.   The study guide has things like Historical context, critical essays and overview, and much more.   Two interesting points from the historical context: Food is in such short supply in England that 53,000 horses were consumed for food in the previous year to feed a population that now exceeds fifty million people. And in London, a four-day smog kills more than four thousand people.

Makes you glad to be living in 2011, doesn't it?   The characters mention ration books in the play, and there are several other lines that have had to be elucidated for younger members of the cast - and such a discussion has reminded those who lived in the UK in the fifties of some of the privations they and their families went through. 

The other interesting thing about reading the script for the first time, is the way Christie's wit shines through it: the rather dour photo that appears of many of her book covers doesn't indicate just how much fun she can be as a writer (I've found one that shows her warmer side better).   Some of her books are more humorous than not, and certainly The Mousetrap has some very funny lines. 

Playing an unsympathetic role

In an article by Luaine Lee on actor Peter Mensah in the freebie paper that comes with the ODT on a Tuesday, I was interested to read the following quote:

Mensah admits it takes daring to be an actor. "Becuse the job requires that I put myself out there and just lay it open. It is a courageous thing to do for a living because you are emotionally bare at times..."


I'm not in the least taking the mickey out of Mensah here - he plays an in-your-face gladiator in the TV series, Spartacus. I agree that there's an element for actors in which they have to take risks, even in the most 'ordinary' roles. I'm still getting used to those first days of rehearsal when you're exploring the character you're playing and having to say and do things that don't necessarily come naturally to you. You have to get over 'yourself' and become something/someone else.

Curiously enough this can be even harder with a role that isn't particularly over-the-top, when you're playing someone 'ordinary.' The ordinary character can be harder to play because he requires less extrovertness. The person I've been playing in Shadowlands, over the last week or so, isn't particularly unusual, doesn't seem to stand out in a crowd (in fact, in the first act of the play he says less than ten lines all up) and seems difficult to play in any way but 'straight.' There are no quirks or peculiarities to him.

So it seems. However, it came to me during rehearsals that he's shallow in his Christianity, and is a surprising person for C S Lewis to have as a friend, because his narrow view of Christianity is quite at odds with Lewis'. I'm not sure how you play 'shallow.' Just speaking the lines doesn't cut it, and you have to find postures, gestures, and facial expressions that portray what he's thinking inside.

On Saturday night, after the performance, a friend who'd been in the audience said she didn't like him: "he's so unsympathetic." And while I hadn't thought consciously about this, I'd obviously brought this to the acting of the part. He is unsympathetic, and thinking about this since confirms that I'm getting hold of what's in the character.

Why I quoted Mensah at the beginning is because Rev Harrington (the role I play) isn't liked by the audience - and I was very aware of it once we actually had audiences. While other characters get audible response from the audience (and that's been the case with most parts I've played in recent years), Harrington doesn't. People will be thinking about how they react to him, no doubt, but you can't hear this, and it's rather isolating for the actor playing him. You have to trust your acting instincts and hope that what you're doing with the part is actually communicating to the audience - and that you're not making an absolute ninny of yourself in doing so. I think that's what Mensah is getting at.

By way of an afterthought: when I first started working on Harrington as a role, I was playing him sympathetically, as it happens. It's my natural default approach to a part, to find the good in a character, and 'enjoy being him.' And this isn't an impossible reading of the role, by any means. I was thinking through the lines again on the way home from the performance last night, and the part could be played this way, as someone who's a step behind the other characters he interacts with, and who's Christianity is still in a stage where he needs to learn some more depth.

But this would leave C S Lewis as something of a bully, because in a couple of scenes in the second act, instead of us having something of an argy-bargy about the issues, as we do now, Lewis would be trampling over the sensitivities of a lesser soul. And I don't think that would put him in a very good light.

Of course, Lewis himself could be played differently. In an early scene, Joy Gresham accuses him of using his intellect to undermine an argument she's making, and in the second act she talks of him being an 'intellectual bully.' This line isn't pursued in this particular production, but in an entirely different one it could easily be.

The fascinations of what you can do with words on a page....

Mensah on the left putting everything out there, and on the right in everyday mode.

Sport overwhelms the Arts

Okay, can anyone tell me why the Otago Daily Times - and no doubt they're not the only paper like this in the country - allows room for three or four pages of sport news every day, and now puts out a new supplement on Fridays, which consists entirely of sport, and takes up another 16 pages!

Can anyone tell me why a quarter of the television 'news' each night consists of sport - and why there are often other sport-focused items in the rest of the news as well? Does sport get no other time/space on television? Nope, it takes over Saturdays to a great extent, and, if there's a really important game on, or the Olympics, or the Commonwealth Games, or the Rugby World Cup, it will get full time on these occasions as well. And all this without mentioning Sky Sport, which goes on day and night into eternity.

This would be fine if sport was the only recreation human beings indulged in, but it ain't!

My rant (which isn't by any means a new one) was boosted again by the fact that the play I'm currently in [Shadowlands] received no review in the ODT. The photo of the cast that the ODT's own photographer came out to take was bundled off into a little corner in the once-weekly Arts section (all two pages of it compared to the more than thirty or so pages sports gets each week) - and was so small no one could be distinguished in it. And the 'report' in the Star midweek paper was nothing but text. Again the photo that had been taken specially failed to appear.

It's enough to make me go out and punch someone, but then I'd probably wind up requiring a Medical Injury Lawyer and I can't afford that at the moment, not now that I'm a retired person (have I mentioned that previously? I have?)

And if you think I'm being aggressive, check out this video of the writer Harlen Ellison going full bore complaining about the way writers are regarded as not needing to be paid for their work...in fact, what he's saying applies to all artists.



All we ask for is a little acknowledgement...