Friday, May 2, 2008

Actors Performing Badly on Purpose in Slings and Arrows

Slings and Arrows. Dir. Peter Wellington. Perf. Martha Burns, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, Mark McKinney, Oliver Dennis, Susan Coyne, Stephen Ouimette, and Catherine Fitch. 2003-2006 (Three Seasons). DVD. Acorn Media, 2006-2007.
Really, this is about actors being directed badly. The image is from a production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Darren Nichols, the incredibly and wonderfully horrific director in Slings and Arrows. They are dressed in costumes made with iron bands and with chess pawns on their heads to indicate man’s inhumanity to man—or something. Terrifically bad idea. Marvelous.

I needed to remind myself that there are really wonderful Shakespearean usages out there. I needed to get the “I think I used one yesterday” nonsense out of my mind.
Links: Episode List at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest