Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
replied to your post : twofrontteethstillcrooked replied to your post …
He was just ambling by pleasantly. It was intermission and I was desperately trying to push through the general crush of people to work my way to the toilets. God, in retrospect I should’ve asked him if he had any special vaguely-famous-person toilet access…
Concept: You are at the world-famous Globe Theatre, where you have taken in half a performance of some Shakespeare work in which all the characters wear black t-shirts and moto jackets, and all of them are played former Doctors Who or Tom Hiddleston. You very much need to find a toilet, despite a suspicion that the authentic Elizabethan way is to just pee wherever.
By accident, you make eye contact across the room with someone – it’s Ian McNeice, the newsreader guy on Rome. He looks totally at ease. He’s having a happy day. Good for Ian McNeice. Drawn to him by instinct, you find yourself drifting through the crowd until you’re standing next to him and then, compelled and unable to stop yourself, you tell him you’re looking for a toilet.
“Oh,” says Ian McNeice. “There’s a special famous people toilet at the Globe, I can get you in.”
Ian McNeice takes you by the hand and navigates deftly through the crowd. You may have passed through a brick wall, or onto the street, or somehow through the floorboards – because suddenly you are no longer in the heated press of intermission, your heart no longer racing from the chaos of families and Shakespeare enthusiasts and bachelorette parties and those people who are constantly engaged in telling others that Shakespeare wrote dick jokes for “groundlings,” people who stood on the floor close to the stage. You are in a quiet, well-lit room. You are far from the madding crowd, and indeed there is the entire cast of Far From the Madding Crowd. In fact in this room is everyone who’s ever been in BBC, HBO, Canal+, or Masterpiece show. Just all there, wearing sweaters and loafers. Reading the Economist in hard copy or hanging out by what appears to be a Deutsche Grammaphon jukebox or arm wrestling Sir Ian McKellen.
At the far side of the room is a door with a toilet symbol on it, and it is there that Ian McNeice directs you.
“Right there,” he says.
You enter the room, pee for a minute while taking in a lot of inscrutable wall etchings like “Dame Judi Dench owes me TWO pieces of gum” and “looking for a recommendation for a nice pair of slippers, much obliged -Dan Stevens.” The hand towels are perfectly dry and extremely plush. You take a couple seconds in the mirror but don’t want Ian McNeice to think you’re doing something weird, so you head on out.
The door opens, and with a compliment about the famous people toilet ready on your lips you step out… into the intermission crowd at the Globe Theatre.
i want an adaptation of hamlet where everything is exactly the same except rosencrantz and guildenstern’s names get increasingly mispronounced and they go from like like “crosenrantz and stuildengern” to “happenstance and gertrude stein”
chibisashimi replied to your post “chibisashimi replied to your post “akahypotheticals replied to…”
This is making me want to resurrect my mythology about the MC in Cabaret who died in the war and came back just to die in the next one. I think this is relating so well because Gereon’s story is a descent, from living Cologne to dead Berlin. To be in Berlin is to be dead, and subject to the rule of stranger kings. That’s why Helga doesn’t fit. She’s alive, and she looks it, compared to Lotte, with Theda Bara eyes, and poor Grete, whose a twitching corpse by the ep 16.
Oooooohhh. Oohh interesting. A city of the dead, and the dead keep it. God that’s so true about Helga, almost like she can’t even SEE that everyone around her is dying (her almost spookily blind response when Gereon at last rises back up from a dose looking like a whole ghost, comes to mind). And Lotte’s Theda Bara eyes yes!
Anyway I also appreciate this Cabaret mythology very much, which has additionally reminded me of a thought I had while running to ‘Wannsee Weise’ the other day:
Volker Bruch Dress Up As the CABARET Emcee For A Promotional Shoot Challenge
“I owned a frame shop in Atlanta for thirty years. But every time I went to a theater and sat in the audience, I got the feeling that God had come and left without me. I just knew that I was meant to perform. Then one day a woman walked up to me in a health food store, and asked: ‘Do you always talk like that or do you have a cold?’ I said: ‘Excuse me?’ And she told me that she wanted to cast me in a BMW commercial. I thought it was a freebie. But on the way out of the studio, they asked for my social security number. $750 for three minutes on the mic! I thought: ‘I need more of this.’ I started taking acting classes. I got cast in a few local plays. I moved to New York on my 50th birthday. I wasn’t about to sit around in my later years wondering if my soul had gotten what it needs. I drew unemployment for the first time in my life. But by 2003 I was a member of SAG. By 2005 I had a speaking part on Law and Order SVU. And at the age of 62 I was given a full scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Things have dried up a bit since then. I had to take care of my mother for six years. And it’s hard for women of a certain age to get cast. But it ain’t over yet. Things happen when they’re supposed to happen. And I’m a firm believer that nobody can get what is yours to have. And I will tell you this: I’ve already envisioned what I’m wearing the first time I get invited to the Oscars. Red mermaid dress, fitted from the waist to the knees, and flaring out at the bottom. A stand-up collar that frames the back of my head. Stunning neckline. And a king’s ransom of rubies on loan from Harry Winston.”
scatterbraineileen replied to your post: Weimar Period Wish List for Babylon Berlin Season…
Berthold Brecht. But we already had his Dreigroschenoper in Season 2.
Hey. I could handle more Brecht.
(famous last words etc.)
sallyboles replied to your post: Weimar Period Wish List for Babylon Berlin Season…
isherwood YESS
Yeeessssss!
wikipedia adventures have taken me to page of actress Sarah Bernhardt, which I HIGHLY recommend reading for cool anecdotes such as:
- as a child in convent school, she was chastised for sacrilege when she held a Christian funeral for her dead pet lizard, complete with a ceremony and procession
- during her first tragedy class examination, she tried to tame her frizzy hair, which only made it worse, (something that also as a woman of Jewish ancestry I can HIGHLY relate to) and came down with a cold, causing her to perform badly
- owned a coffin where she studied her roles and sometimes slept in, talk about Gothic lifestyle
- was almost always surrounded by one or two dogs, and loved animals in general. In her life she owned two borzois, a wolfhound, a poodle, a bullmastiff, a Manchester terrier, an Italian greyhound, an Affenpinscher, cats, parrots, and horses. However, she ALSO owned a tigress, a wolf, a cheetah, a leopard, a lynx, a puma, two jaguars and two alligators. One of her alligators supposedly died after drinking too much champagne.
- managed a hospital during the Franco-Prussian war, working as a nurse and helped the chief surgeon with operations and amputations. When they ran out of fuel, she burned her own stage props for heat
- took on a huge amount of lovers in her life, and was almost definitely bisexual– her relationship with French impressionist Louise Abbéma was extremely “close,” which is Wikipeida talk for “they were totally banging”
- defended Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affair at the cost of antisemitic tracts published against her and the year long estrangement from her own son
- also an accomplished sculptor!
- huge fan club, including Victor Hugo, Czar Alexander III, Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Pyotr Illyich Tchiakovsky
- when her leg had to be amputated due to gangrene, she refused crutches, wheelchairs, and a prosthetic. Instead she had a fucking palanquin built in the style of Louis XV and was carried around by two men
- known for playing male roles as adeptly as she did female roles, here she is as Hamlet:
anyway since I am ALSO a dramatic bisexual of Jewish ancestry, she’s my new role model and I love her