![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anotherusedpageSomething that someone said at the G and S rehearsal last night very gave me the urge to make a wise crack involving G and S hackery mixed with wet!boys olympic swim team slash. One of those moments when you know that no one else in the room, or conceivably the entire universe, would get the joke... unfortunately I don't now remember the line, so... this is a bit of a pointless thought really.
In other news... well, I've been quite up since Monday night. I've actually succeeded in getting a small amount of constuctive work done, and in being generally positive and stuff. I've written some original fic, and I've been fiddling with music composition again, and generally feeling a bit more creative and stuff.
Football. Didn't get to see the friendlies. There was a reason.... oh yeah, that was it:
I went to London, to see the plays of His Dark Materials at the national. They were absobloodylutely fabulous. The puppetry is extremely effective, although it takes a while to get used to it. The acting was superb. I especially liked Will's gawkish teenaged boy gig. Wasn't such a huge fan of Lyra... I think it was just that her voice was a bit high-pitched and girly. I didn't think she was enough of a tom boy. And she was blond. But still. There were bits that she did extremely well. Lord Asriel was fantastic; nothing like my mental picture (the actor was black) but he had an awful lot of stage presence and didn't half look good swinging a sword around. He had a rebellious, fanatical streak to him that was perfect. The church inquisition bad-guy types were really well done too, superbly creepy, and that bit more dangerous than they were in the book. And they all had reptillion daemons.
And the bears! Iorek especially. I'd seen pictures of how they were doing it, and I couldn't imagine it working, but it really does. You don't see the actor's face, you only see the bear. Which only has one facial expression, but... oh, it worked so wonderfully. He could look haughty or depressed or worried or... anything really, and it was all down to posture, which I suppose it just perfect for a bear.
My favourite bit was the land of the dead sequence. It was set up so that the audience were included in the dead, and the characters with lines came out from amongst the audience and literaly climbed through and over us, jumping down from one level of the auditorium to another, swinging their legs right over the edge up in the gods, and then kinda swinging over into the circle, and walking down not the stairs, but the other side, the bit with the railings... it was just so cool and so creepy. I cried, when she set them free. I don't remember doing that when I read the book.
At the end, the technical crew got to come out on stage for a bow with the cast, which was adorable and appropriate, cos so much of the effectiveness of the plays was down to the incredible technical stuff, the moving sets and props and funky lighting, and it's all so smooth and fluid that you don't even notice how complicated what they're doing is.
It was the first time I'd been back to the National Theatre since the last time I acted there, and the first time I'd ever gone in through the front door. It was such a weird experience. I'd never seen all of the foyers before, never really seen the auditorium in the Olivier, certainly not from up in the circle. It... didn't look the way I remembered. Partly because the stage is set up differently to usual - the poppadum is replaced by a slightly larger rotating drum, with three different interior sets instead of only two like for Willows. It sticks out further into the auditorium. And partly because last time I was in their was... seven years ago now.
I ended up feeling all nostalgic and kinda... home sick. I wish I was ten again, and had all that confidence back. When I left the last time, when I was fourteen, I was sure I'd be coming back for another production sometime soon... Even if I acheive everything I want to out of life, that's not a stage I can picture ending up on again. I won't be going down the acting route, even if I do go back into performance. And god is that a weird feeling. I've known it since theatre studies A level, really. But going back into the theatre kind of... crystalised it in my mind.
When I was just finishing up my last run there, I was reading Small Gods, the Terry Pratchett book. I tend to get teary eyed when I'm reading it now, because of the bit with all the old gods in the desert, and the stuff about maybe it's better never to have been a god at all, than to have lost it all and come to nothing. Sometimes I wish that I hadn't been so confident and thought that I was good when I was younger.
So, that's Jessie's dose of melodrama for the week. It didn't get me down, as such, just... made me think. I guess its time to start valuing the Festival Hall and Barbican properly, and not taking them for granted.
Right. I've successfully procrastinated away this morning's potential time for work. Now I'd better get on with things...
In other news... well, I've been quite up since Monday night. I've actually succeeded in getting a small amount of constuctive work done, and in being generally positive and stuff. I've written some original fic, and I've been fiddling with music composition again, and generally feeling a bit more creative and stuff.
Football. Didn't get to see the friendlies. There was a reason.... oh yeah, that was it:
I went to London, to see the plays of His Dark Materials at the national. They were absobloodylutely fabulous. The puppetry is extremely effective, although it takes a while to get used to it. The acting was superb. I especially liked Will's gawkish teenaged boy gig. Wasn't such a huge fan of Lyra... I think it was just that her voice was a bit high-pitched and girly. I didn't think she was enough of a tom boy. And she was blond. But still. There were bits that she did extremely well. Lord Asriel was fantastic; nothing like my mental picture (the actor was black) but he had an awful lot of stage presence and didn't half look good swinging a sword around. He had a rebellious, fanatical streak to him that was perfect. The church inquisition bad-guy types were really well done too, superbly creepy, and that bit more dangerous than they were in the book. And they all had reptillion daemons.
And the bears! Iorek especially. I'd seen pictures of how they were doing it, and I couldn't imagine it working, but it really does. You don't see the actor's face, you only see the bear. Which only has one facial expression, but... oh, it worked so wonderfully. He could look haughty or depressed or worried or... anything really, and it was all down to posture, which I suppose it just perfect for a bear.
My favourite bit was the land of the dead sequence. It was set up so that the audience were included in the dead, and the characters with lines came out from amongst the audience and literaly climbed through and over us, jumping down from one level of the auditorium to another, swinging their legs right over the edge up in the gods, and then kinda swinging over into the circle, and walking down not the stairs, but the other side, the bit with the railings... it was just so cool and so creepy. I cried, when she set them free. I don't remember doing that when I read the book.
At the end, the technical crew got to come out on stage for a bow with the cast, which was adorable and appropriate, cos so much of the effectiveness of the plays was down to the incredible technical stuff, the moving sets and props and funky lighting, and it's all so smooth and fluid that you don't even notice how complicated what they're doing is.
It was the first time I'd been back to the National Theatre since the last time I acted there, and the first time I'd ever gone in through the front door. It was such a weird experience. I'd never seen all of the foyers before, never really seen the auditorium in the Olivier, certainly not from up in the circle. It... didn't look the way I remembered. Partly because the stage is set up differently to usual - the poppadum is replaced by a slightly larger rotating drum, with three different interior sets instead of only two like for Willows. It sticks out further into the auditorium. And partly because last time I was in their was... seven years ago now.
I ended up feeling all nostalgic and kinda... home sick. I wish I was ten again, and had all that confidence back. When I left the last time, when I was fourteen, I was sure I'd be coming back for another production sometime soon... Even if I acheive everything I want to out of life, that's not a stage I can picture ending up on again. I won't be going down the acting route, even if I do go back into performance. And god is that a weird feeling. I've known it since theatre studies A level, really. But going back into the theatre kind of... crystalised it in my mind.
When I was just finishing up my last run there, I was reading Small Gods, the Terry Pratchett book. I tend to get teary eyed when I'm reading it now, because of the bit with all the old gods in the desert, and the stuff about maybe it's better never to have been a god at all, than to have lost it all and come to nothing. Sometimes I wish that I hadn't been so confident and thought that I was good when I was younger.
So, that's Jessie's dose of melodrama for the week. It didn't get me down, as such, just... made me think. I guess its time to start valuing the Festival Hall and Barbican properly, and not taking them for granted.
Right. I've successfully procrastinated away this morning's potential time for work. Now I'd better get on with things...