Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!
This term we're going to be looking at 'Romeo and Juliet', one of the most famous pieces of writing in the English Language. We'll be doing a lot of drama work - both improv and scripted - as well as writing our own playscripts, and my hope is that by the end of this term everyone will have a very solid understanding of how playscripts in general function, that we'll all have honed our acting and directing skills, and that you'll have a bit more of a clue as to why William Shakespeare remains the most famous writer in the history of the English language.
(Hint: basically, it's because he's awesome. Not EASY, mind you, and not always awesome*, but when he's good, he blows everyone else out of the water.)
Now, obviously back when Wm Shakespeare was writing and acting, people didn't have TV or cinema (let alone the internet, or flushing toilets, or ipods, or mobile phones). This means that the theatre was very popular, and it wasn't seen as a High So kind of entertainment. (Rich people and royalty might get playwrights and troops of actors to come and give them private performances, which was as close as anyone got to having a huge flat screen TV with massive speakers in their living room.)
Theatres weren't super classy places, that's what I'm trying to convey. They were generally open to the weather, with the sunlight providing the lighting, and burning torches being lit as the evening grew darker. Poor people could stand in front of the stage watching; wealthier people sat on benches, and might have their own cushions. Very wealthy people sat in special balcony sections. When it rained, the poor people got rained on. The audiences were VERY rude. Granted, they didn't have mobile phones, but they'd just stand around talking loudly to their friends while the actors were valiantly trying to do their bit on the stage. They ate and drank whilst they watched the show, and if they didn't like it, they threw things at you and shouted insults.
All Shakespeare's plays - even the most profound and serious and tragic ones - are packed with jokes (often very rude ones) to keep the audience paying attention and in a good mood. He understood the human heart and soul -the best and worst of us, the stupid, petty, weak things and the moments of grace - and he was able to pin it down in words that have lasted for hundreds of years.
But he also liked a good fart gag as much as the next person (assuming that the next person is a nine year old boy who likes fart gags), so it's not all art and beauty and high ideals.
A few years ago, the playwright Tom Stoppard (who is A REALLY REALLY FABULOUS WRITER, by the way) wrote the script for a Hollywood movie about the life of Shakespeare. It's not true. It's not even pretending to be true - in fact, it's basically what Perth would call fanfiction. Really really good fanfic, packed with jokes that will appeal to Shakespeare fans, but also very understandable for ordinary movie-goers who aren't Shakespeare fans. The plot is a sort of mixture of true details of Shakespeare's life, and the plot of his excellent comedy 'Twelfth Night', and a bit of 'Romeo and Juliet' mixed in too.
Since, alas, I rather fear you good people are too young to watch the whole film right now (it's got some saucy bits that are probably not really appropriate for Year 8/9, unfortunately), I'm just going to point you at the trailer. What's cool about the trailer is that it gives you a pretty good idea of what Elizabethan London looked like, as well as the inside of theatres back then.
We'll be talking about this idea of having a trailer to get the audience interested when we start studying 'Romeo and Juliet', because even though they didn't have YouTube or cinemas or anything like that, they still often included something like a trailer at the start of a play, so people knew what was going to happen in the show.
(*Ask me about 'Titus Andronicus' some time. It's kind of Shakespeare having a Tarantino moment, with as much violence, brutality and over-the-top soap opera craziness as he could possibly cram into the script. The comedies are generally good - and sometimes lovely - but they're mostly pretty frivolous and disposable. It's the tragedies that made him immortal - 'Hamlet', 'Macbeth', 'Lear', 'Antony and Cleopatra', 'Othello', 'Romeo and Juliet' and the rest. And it's not just the stories. It's the way he TELLS the stories.)
