Snow at home

I have seen, thanks to the glorious technology of facetime, that there is already snow at home in Winnipeg. Albeit the icy, only-on-the-banisters kind, but snow nonetheless. Things are getting colder here, and some trees are turning, but many are still rather green and fully leaved. Right now it is great, although at some point the curiosity of ever-green might wear off. I'm told it gets "brown" here, however having lived through Winnipeg springs for the last 29 years, seriously doubt it can be quite as brown as my least favourite season.

Spent a lot of time in the RADA library, picked up some reading, mainly for my own purposes; Absolutely! (perhaps) by Luigi Pirandello, Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, Sophocles' Antigone, fat pig by Neil LaBute, and Palace of the End by Judith Thompson. Also a book on the context of Medieval Theatre for research on Ludus Danielis, the play I will be co-directing for the King's College MA students with two fellow RADA MA's. I want to do a bit of dramaturgical work for this specifically, because my previous experience with the Medieval plays is limited to discussions in Theatre History back at UW.

On to class; today we were discussing Aristotle and Plato's ideas about the theatre, followed by an in-depth look at the similarity and difference between The Oresteia and Hamlet in terms of structure, function of the characters, and presentation of argument. I found it quite interesting to re-read Aristotle and Plato in this context, with only excerpts (and from poor translations...) to guide us. I felt compelled to argue in defense of Plato, who was presented separated from his view of the human condition (cave image) and from his later Phaedrus. For me, Plato's false idols are still a problem, however not an indication that all art is bad.

We did an exercise creating an image of the plots of Hamlet and an Aristotelian tragedy. This proved really difficult, partially because I felt our group lacked significant focus. I am not entirely happy with the result we produced on this, and am going to spend some time on my own creating an image system to do this task. I am hoping this clarifies my thoughts, particularly those about the point of climax in Hamlet...as stated in an earlier blog, I feel that the deaths are not necessarily the climax. This is an argument I want to play out some more