“I tried to argue that Ophelia resonated because Shakespeare had made an extraordinary discovery in writing her, though I had trouble articulating the nature of that discovery. I didn’t want to admit that it could be something as simple as recognizing that emotionally unstable teenage girls are human beings. … When Ophelia appears onstage in Act IV, scene V, singing little songs and handing out imaginary flowers, she temporarily upsets the entire power dynamic of the Elsinore court. When I picture that scene, I always imagine Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Horatio sharing a stunned look, all of them thinking the same thing: “We fucked up. We fucked up bad.” It might be the only moment of group self-awareness in the whole play. Not even the grossest old Victorian dinosaur of a critic tries to pretend that Ophelia is making a big deal out of nothing. Her madness and death is plainly the direct result of the alternating tyranny and neglect of the men in her life. She’s proof that adolescent girls don’t just go out of their minds for the fun of it. They’re driven there by people in their lives who should have known better.”
there was a disastrous performance of Macbeth at the Old Vic by Peter O’Toole and apparently there was this one part in the play one night where a Servant comes in and should say “Your wife, my lord, is dead” but what ACTUALLY happened was
admittedly I don’t normally like modern shakespeare adaptations but once I went to see my cousin in a midsummer night’s dream and it opened with a high schooler saying “I don’t wanna read this play” so he sits down and eats an entire chipotle burrito on stage and then immediately falls asleep and the play begins but instead of the forest the faeries all hang out in a rainforest cafe TM and at one point in the middle of a scene the guy from the beginning just slowly drifts across the back of the stage on a skateboard, staring at all the characters as the events of the play transpire in the form of some sort of chipotle-induced coma lucid dream
THAT is EXACTLY what Shakespeare would have wanted
I swear if this isn’t floating around on the internet I’m gonna cry
Oh buddy IT’S ABOUT TO BE. I am like, 98% sure this was my high school’s production and I’ve got photos and video clips like craaaazy…
Here are some fun additions… the Mechanicals were also based on the characters of The Breakfast Club (here I am below, eating an actual Captain Crunch and Pixie Stix sandwich on stage.)
…and the one on the longboard was actually our Puck – he rode it through the whole play in the background. Please note his “Forest Cafe” shirt… which we also had logos for on the cups.
…and we had both a flash mob at the end AND an interlude where myself and one of the other Fairies danced to “Sexy and I Know It” while we were cleaning up the tables at the cafe.
I will post more of this later. I have a DVD at my house and will endure cringing at myself to bring you some quality clips… there’s probably one of K eating the burrito before the start of the play, too.
Here ya go kids… all 2h20m. if you make it through the whole thing once, that’s probably more times than any of the cast watched this DVD. You can probably see why. Tbh if you watch this, I am sorry in advance.
Important notes:
– Chipotle burrito makes a cameo about 30 min in,
– the end has a flash mob and a “commercial” for the Forest Cafe,
– unfortunately, the lunch scene where all the mechanicals whistle like the Breakfast Club got mostly cut for some reason?
–
@vampireapologist in case you have any interest in reliving this… at the very least you can prove to any doubters that there was, in fact, a Chipotle burrito onstage.
I cannot even fully conceptualize, much less put into words, how wild this chain of events has been.
I have dozens of posts going around that have broken 50,000 notes, and plenty that have broken 100,000.
On every single one of these posts, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of comments and tags calling me a liar and the story fake, but none so much as this post.
Play idea: perform MacBeth, but when the witches are doing their prophecy thing, they segue into telling the story of Hamlet. Hamlet is chatting with the ghost when it starts telling a Midsummer Night’s Dream. The audience becomes slowly aware that the programs and advertisements did not publish a runtime for the performance. Ushers start handing out new programs, with new actors’ names on them in previously unmentioned roles. Every single known Shakespeare play is nested inside the performance. The theatre doors are locked.
At intermission they play one (1) It’s Not Unusual
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin is the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar, thus both knows abt ghosts and knows Latin, so it is very reasonable to assume he will b able to ask this one what up (as obviously sth must b up 4 it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, gawd, this is like. the most basic of basic-level shit)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. T H E MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation of this scene n make a fcuking fool of emselves lmao
this feels less like a “checkmate, Shakespeare” moment than a “fuck was this dude on, this shit’s surreal” moment
personally I kinda love the complete effect of “thing that made sense when originally written appears hilarious/fascinating/weird as balls to people who don’t have that context, and then context is made known to them and it’s like a whole new level of supercool”
it’s like the circle of life for shakespeare plays. “lol have the college guy talk to the ghost because as a college guy he has the necessary experience” transmutes into “every college was ghost college in shakespeare’s time” and the whole effect is awesome.
just gonna add a bunch of things here bc i love this moment in the play actually and it’s really interesting! because shakespeare was p smart.
marcellus and bernardo have seen the ghost before but they go to horatio with this information before they go to, say, anyone who actually fucking lives there
given hamlet’s reaction to horatio showing up in the next scene we can be pretty sure that no one knew horatio was even coming to elsinore (unless maybe claudius and gertrude invited him without telling hamlet and the soldiers got to him before they could work on him like ros&guil, but a) that’s a stretch and b) horatio’s relationship with the family outside of hamlet is seriously up for debate and a big question to answer for that role)
so like… how did m&b even find horatio to tell him about the ghost and why was it him they told? clearly they want to get validation before going to someone Important but the circumstances of this arrangement are RULL WEIRD
(the ‘you went to ghost college’ line isn’t just about horatio being able to speak to the ghost bc he’s been to ghost college, it’s about having a SCHOLAR validate what they saw, so when they go to someone with power to do something about it they can push horatio to the front and say ‘the learned rich guy thinks there’s a ghost too please actually listen to us’)
when they DO go to tell hamlet it’s basically just a bff reunion + btw ghost so clearly they did some strategizing after this scene as to how best to broach that topic (it’s horatio that says ‘it’ll probably speak to hamlet’ but if it had been someone different would they have thought ‘it’ll probably speak to gertrude’? that they go to hamlet with it is BECAUSE horatio is there so like… again i come back to how did they find him)
PEOPLE P MUCH ALWAYS CUT THESE LINES BUT BOTH THE SOLDIERS AND HORATIO ASSUME THE GHOST IS THERE BECAUSE OF THE WAR WITH NORWAY, NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS DEATH– it would’ve been a HELLA PLOT TWIST when he started talking about murder in 1.5
wittenberg was also famously associated with dr. faustus and martin luther, which the audience at the time would have known, which is part of why it was the most spoopy
we don’t know horatio went to wittenberg at this point. like we the reader know, we the people putting on this play know, but we the audience don’t know. it’s actually a cool ‘aha’ moment in the next scene when claudius brings up wittenberg and you’re like AH YES, GHOST COLLEGE
we also have no idea what horatio and hamlet’s relationship is like so when horatio shows up in the next scene and hamlet goes from ‘i hate everyone’ to ‘OMG UR HEEEEEEEEEERE’ with this dude we only know as ‘new in town’ and ‘intellectual’ we know that hamlet will believe him about the ghost and that (because we’ve already been over how he’s level headed and smart) he’ll be there to help us out with our lead who’s not quite all there which is a p cool setup by billy
why is the ghost just like wandering the battlements? it’s pretty heavily implied he won’t speak to anyone but hamlet so why doesn’t he just go to him? the haunting rules for the ghost are all over the place and again that’s like a serious conversation you have to have with the actor, what the heck is he doing here
TBH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS SCENE, THAT A LOT OF LIKE SUPER ESTABLISHED SCHOLARS AND DIRECTORS STRAIGHT UP FORGET: this scene is here at least partially to establish that the ghost is objectively there. there is some sort of fragment of spirit wandering the battlements that looks like the dead king and it wants something. it only TALKS to hamlet, and when it shows up later gertrude can’t see it, but the first thing we learn in this play is THERE IS A GHOST. shakespeare takes great care to make sure we know we can trust our eyes with it. our ears perhaps not, but the play is not from hamlet’s pov. we start with marcellus and bernardo, and grounded loyal horatio, saying ‘what the fuck what is this ghost doing here’. the mystical bit isn’t what’s up for debate
also ‘thou’rt a scholar, speak to it horatio’ is fucking hilarious and no one ever plays it as a joke
like why isn’t this ALWAYS staged as marcellus and bernardo hiding behind horatio and pushing him at the ghost and him going ?!!!?!?!?!?!? i just got here and you have swords what the fuck is wrong with you
basically it’s like a couple of small town cops going “oh thank fuck agent mulder is here”
Any time anyone starts to take Shakespeare too seriously I have to remind them that “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” is a dick joke
Much Ado About Nothing is a play which ends with the line ‘for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion’. Which basically translates as ‘people are dumb, the end.’
If it’s good enough for Shakespeare it’s good enough for me.
rip tumblr 