All The Virtual World's A Stage

Last week I played my first Virtual Reality game. It’s called The Tempest, have you tried it?

There’s this old woman, Prospera, who lives on an island and wants revenge, it seems. I was the only player on that day, so I started as myself, then became Miranda…then I think I was the bad guy at one point, and then I was back to Miranda.

The whole Virtual Reality experience left my state altered for about 18 hours after the event. And not in the same way I used to be altered by live theatre experiences back in the old days. It was overwhelming at first - I was definitely overstimulated. But it soon faded to just an occasional flash through my brain of a spinning and swirling triangular cartoon character.

Now it’s hard to remember that it even happened at all. I mean, I know that it did. I have a sense of myself standing in my living room, looking like Princess Leia in that bounty hunter get-up that time she rescued Han Solo from Jabba The Hut, and, I gather, waving my arms around and shuffling my feet *cue hysterical laughter from those watching me*.

But the memory is housed in a different part of me, because my body-brain can’t recall much of it. I have no physical reference point of walking into a theatre and sitting in my seat. My heart did not beat in tempo with fellow audience members. My breath did not sync with the players on the stage.

Back at the start of 2020 I wrote about working and learning remotely, and the past six months has taught me a little more about that. And I have a lot to say - I am a talker, after all, and when I learn a little, I talk a lot. But in that respect, I’m thinking about the benefits of online learning, and I’ll try to articulate more about that later. Tomorrow. Because today I’m thinking about what happens when mind and body are separated. What happens when the head brain is receiving all the information and stimuli? The body brain is relegated to responding to, and adapting to, the unusual weight of machinery and electricity putting pressure on the cranium. Huh. What heavy issues must be virtually grappled with up there…

I’ve just now realized that in the Tempest game, I saw no Caliban. Where was that character? Was it too hard to integrate the data for a figure who embodies connection to the land? Too hard to find a digital role for a physical sense of place?

No wonder those VR figures have large heads covered by powerful, magical masks. Heads which lead the movements, and drive the figures endlessly forward, onward, through virtual space, as their light bodies float behind.

The Gap of Time

Okay look, I know there has been an onslaught of Shakespeare Anything "because 400th", but the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is actually a great thing.  A bunch of award-winning authors are writing novels based on Shakespeare plays.  Like peanut butter and chocolate, put two great things together and there's just no downside. 

Jeanette Winterson's novel is called 'The Gap of Time', based on 'The Winter's Tale'.  I have my own reasons for wanting to read this particular story at this particular time.  But I'm compelled to tell everyone I know to read it too, whether or not you ever intend to see a production of this play again. 

Winterson's modern take will crack this old fairy tale open like crazy for you.  In London's financial district: a digital camera lens into Leontes' insane and terrifying jealousy.  In Louisiana: piano bars, car repairs, and families.  The confusing and complex nature of love. 

And in the end, the possibility that what is lost can, in fact, be found. 

Play Dead

Waking up this morning, it drifted through my mind how Shakespeare liked to have actors play dead. Of course, the actual death toll in the Complete Works is substantial, and people have compiled lists, created pie charts, and performed new plays to illustrate the many ways characters are sliced, diced, pummeled and poisoned.

But there are also characters who only pretend to die, and that event is usually the turning point in the story. There’s Hero in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: she ‘dies’ because of being shamed at the altar, and so that Claudio can feel the grief and loss and regret for his mistaken punishment of her. In ‘A Winter’s Tale’, Hermione is another virtuous woman accused of being false. She too must appear to be dead until her husband truly recognizes her innocence and mourns his loss.

This summer at Bard on the Beach, you will see Juliet pretend to die to avoid marrying Paris. In ‘Pericles’, Marina will be thought to be killed by the evil Dionyza’s henchman, and Thaisa, believed to have died in childbirth, is thrown overboard a ship by Pericles.

Sometimes the audience is in on the secret although the characters are not. The deaths, real or pretended, are always important. Men really die and their ghosts often return to haunt the killer (or an indecisive child). When the women die they don’t haunt anyone. And sometimes they have to pretend to die just so the men can grow up. 

That Was Then, This Is Now

Here's a photo I found in a old file folder, taken when I was coaching ‘Romeo & Juliet’ at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival in 2007.

...and here's another one, taken recently by the genius Mark Halliday, during rehearsals at Bard on the Beach again this summer.

These pictures track a decade of my coaching life.  I'm now bespectacled, goofier, and apparently still unable to speak without the hand.