This one is a little more personal than my previous posts.
In March 2020 the UK started to feel the impact of the Covid 19 virus on a national scale. In the span of two weeks all shows were cancelled or postponed and film productions postponed until further notice. I lost all of my work for the year with in a week. My muggle job in hospitality took longer but eventually they too cancelled all events for the month.
Robert Myles, whose fantastic workshops on Shakespeare I had attended last year, wrote a post on Twitter asking if anyone would be interested in doing a live reading of Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order. he was overwhelmed with responses. Maybe a deep profound love for Shakespeare is embedded in all of us theatre people, maybe it is the fact that Shakespeare himself lived through the plague and often had to go into isolation. Times where dark for theatre then and they are dark for theatre now.
Amongst hundreds of responses lay mine. And two days later I got an email. I had been cast in the first reading of The Show Must Go Online project. We would be reading Two Gentlemen of Verona. We had two days with the script and a few hours of rehearsals. The rehearsals were non compulsory and were held via Zoom. Participants would dip in and out of the rehearsal room at different times and therefore rehearsals took on a slightly strange air. And yet we felt inspired to make this reading the best we could. During rehearsals we found ways to make the reading more visual for the audience, using the cameras to our advantages to make it appear as if we were all a part of the same world.
During the live stream we were watched by approximately 500 audience members who were actively commenting on the stream throughout the reading. This is gave us a feeling of audience response second to none. One wonders if this is how it felt like when Shakespeare´s company performed to the groundlings at the Globe, who would doubtlessly shout out and respond immediately to the action taking place on stage. Many commented that the soliloquies felt immensely powerful as well, directed straight to the camera.
Today the recording of the stream had all of 22.000 views.
Please tune in next week when we will be doing The Taming Of The Shrew with a different cast and keep following the project as we grow.
