Merchant of Venice

I went out to the Festival Theatre today to meet up with my Mom, we were there to see The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, starring Jonathan Pryce. The play is about a merchant who falls into debt with a moneylender who demands a pound of the merchant's flesh, if he doesn't pay. It's a powerful, troubling, but often very funny play, with a sensational performance by Pryce.

Birthday and Christmas

It has been a really busy few days! On Wednesday the 23rd it was my 31st birthday and my Dad came around to take me to my parent's house. For my birthday presents I got the Blu-Ray DVD of True Blood season one, the DVD of Peep Show season six, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Ten: The Wake written by Neil Gaiman, a New England tee-shirt, a portable Trivial Pursuit pack with all the questions focussing on Entertainment (i.e. film, music, books and sport), a magnetic dart board and some gift vouchers. My brother and his girlfriend, Katherine, were due to come up the day before to spend Christmas at my parents but, due to the really bad weather, they weren't able to come up then, and they came on my brithday so instead of going to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch as we had planned, we decided to have a Chinese take-away meal instead.

On Christmas Eve I stayed in and watched Peep Show. In the afternoon I played a few games of darts and Trivial Pursuit with the family. In the evening I was watching a horror movie from 1974 on TV called Black Christmas, directed by Bob Clark, in which a mysterious killer stalks a group of college students who are staying in a sorority house over Christmas.

On Christmas Day itself We all opened up our presents together. I got a DVD of Doctor Who: The War Games, the graphic novel of The Sandman Volume Nine: The Kindly Ones written by Neil Gaiman, a video game called Bioshock for the PlayStation 3, a book called The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, a book called Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar, a 2010 diary, a Doctor Who calendar, and some chocolate. We had a great Christmas lunch with the usual turkey, miniature sausages, stuffing, rolls of bacon, roast potatoes, peas and gravy with crackers that all had musical instruments in them and basically one person acted as conducter and the rest of us had to try to play a tune with the instruments. In the evening I watched the Christmas special of Doctor Who, which was the first of a two part story which marks the final story that David Tennant plays the role of the Doctor.

Yesterday I went back home and watched the TV broadcast of Hamlet, which is probably the most famous of the plays by William Shakespeare. The story revolves around Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, who is extremely upset by his mother marrying his uncle, Claudius, less than two months after the mysterious death of his father. One night, Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father who informs Hamlet that he was murdered by Claudius, and orders Hamlet to avenge his death. The TV broadcast was a version of the very highly acclaimed recent Royal Shakespeare Company production and starred David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.

Today I stayed in and listened to a radio show called On the Outside it Looked like an Old-Fashioned Police Box, which was a documentary, hosted by Mark Gatiss, about the Target Books novelisations of Doctor Who stories which were very popular in the 1970s and 80s. I remember those books really well, because I read loads of them when I was a kid. They were really good and they were pretty much the first novels that I ever really read kind of on my own. In my High School they had a wide selection of them in the school library and they used to let us spend two lunchtimes a week in the library, if we wanted to, and every time I got the chance I used to go over there and read a Doctor Who book. Only the Doctor Who books for about five years. So even today if I watch an old episode of the show on DVD that I have never seen before I still have a weird sense of deja vu, and I remember it was because I read the novelisation of the show about twenty times when I was thirteen. Later on I watched a 1966 Doctor Who story on DVD called "The War Machines" in which a powerful new supercomputer has been installed in the then-newly constructed Post Office Tower in London. Of course the computer then decides to take over the world by brainwashing people to build robot "War Machines" (which kind of look like miniature tanks). It was pretty good.

It has been a really good few days.

Macbeth

Last night I was watching the 1948 movie of Macbeth, directed by and starring Orson Welles and based on the William Shakespeare play. Set in medieval Scotland, the story concerns celebrated soldier Macbeth (played by Orson Welles) who, after a victorious battle, encounters three strange women who proclaim that he will be named Thane of Cawdor and that shortly afterwards he will become king of Scotland. Immediately after they disappear, Macbeth is met by a messenger who informs him that the current Thane of Cawdor is due to be executed for treason, and that the King has appointed Macbeth Thane of Cawdor as a reward for his victory. Furthermore, the King and his entourage are going to be spending the night in Macbeth's castle. When he tells the news to his wife, she encourages Macbeth to murder the King in order to fulfill the prophecy. The movie suffers from badly recorded sound and some bizarre attempts at Scottish accents, with Welles' accent especially prone to drifiting back and forth across the Atlantic. However, it is very atmospheric with the sets and production design conveying a powerful sense of decay and corruption. There is an old theatrical superstition that Macbeth is an unlucky play, and it is said to be very bad luck to say the title of the play in a theatre, it is often referred to as "The Scottish Play". One of the stories behind it is that Shakespeare stole some of the rituals and spells from a real witches coven and used them in the play without permission and so the witches cursed it in revenge.

This morning my Dad came to collect me and we went along to the Omni Centre shopping mall, where we had some coffee and a chocolate muffin. Then we split up and did some of our own shopping. I got a book called Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

Then I went along to my parent's house for lunch as usual for a Sunday.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

I was watching a couple of episodes of Quatermass and the Pit on DVD last night. That's probably the most famous and well remembered of the Quatermass serials. It's really good, and very well-written and well-acted. The show was broadcast live and so there are a few sequences were the camera loses focus, or bumps into things and in one sequence where the camera operator seems to lose control of the thing and the picture ends up going all over the place.

Work was dull today, as usual. There is a big desk move happening at the weekend, where we are all going to end up in different rooms. I was really bored. My brother works as a musician and lives in London. He's a free-lance musician and part-time teacher and naturally his income can be very erratic, whereas I have a regular income. Also he shares a house with a bunch of people, whereas I have my own place. However, I have always envied him in a way because he does something that he really loves. My brother loves music and would probably still be involved in it even if he wasn't getting paid for it. The only reason I do my job is because I need the money. I'd like to be successful like my brother, I want to do something in film, writing, performance, something creative or cultural, but I'm kind of stuck because of my own stupidity and complete lack of any talent whatsoever.

On to something much more cheerful, I left work at around quarter past six and headed into Princes Street, where I killed about quarter of an hour looking at the DVD sales in HMV. I met my mum at around seven and we headed up to the King's Theatre to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play is one of William Shakespeare's most famous and best loved comedies. The story is set in Athens where Lysander and Hermia are in love, but Hermia's father insists that she marries Demeter, who is in love with her bust she is not interested in him. However, Helena is in love with Demeter who is not interested in her. Lysander and Hermia decide to elope and escape into the nearby forest, closely followed by Demeter, who is in turn followed by Helena. In the forest, Oberon, King of the Fairies and his Queen, Titania, are fighting, and a group of amateur actors are rehersing a play to be performed at the wedding of the Duke of Athens. I know the plya well, I've read it and I've seen it performed a few times. This was an Indian production of the play, and was extremely lavish, featuring musicians, dancers, singers, acrobats and martial artists from all over India and Malaysia. The show was very colourful and spectacular. It mixed the English dialogue with other languages. It was a great evening.