There is no greater drama than that of learning to love.  Romantic love is only one part of that drama, but in it, as in every partial love, we can see the larger drama at work.  Director Polly Findlay’s production of As You Like It was especially helpful in highlighting the acute vulnerability and journey that loving requires of us.  And this course, Understanding As You Like It, led by theatre critic and academic Kate Bassett, was particularly helpful in revealing the vulnerability and journey accepted by this NT company in offering us this depiction of love.

I will summarise the course, segment by segment, and thenconclude with my own thoughts, endeavoring to put As You Like It in the context of Socratic drama.

First, James Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1599.  That’s  when the Bard opened the Globe, wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and started in on Hamlet.  Then Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1606, when he wrote Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.  And now Paul Strohm treats us to Chaucer in 1386, when he hit upon the idea and plan of the Canterbury Tales.An evidence-based study of one artist’s creative circumstance at one key creative moment.  It’s a brilliant approach to a practical problem.

Once you have seen this, you will want to see every role that Patsy Ferran ever plays.

Originally, I had booked to see this production just once. But in Chichester, in November, I was convinced otherwise by a man sitting next to me throughout the three-in-a-day Young Chekhov festival. I took the guy seriously: he’s a total fanatic, who saw 160 plays last year and 135 the year before. He said that this is the best production of As You Like It that he’s ever seen — so good, he need never see another.

A wholesale re-telling of Euripides’ tragedy from the boys’ perspective.

The inclusion of voices, the oppressed, the unheard… it all sounds like a good thing. And I think it is, so long as not part of an ideological project to exclude other voices. Given that this theatre puts itself forward as self-consciously progressive, I feared the worst: not art, but preaching.

With operas titled Otello, Macbeth, and Falstaff, Verdi surely must have loved Shakespeare.

If there is indeed a Heaven (and let’s not get into that, just now) and if I should be admitted (we can skip over that one too), I would love to organise a colloquium that would be based on Plato’s Symposium, with the addition of a few other choice souls, including Verdi and Shakespeare.

It’s not often that I see a contemporary play. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve only been to one before, Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem, this year at the National.  I’m so busy trying to catch up on some fifty years of not having gone to the theatre that there is now hardly enough time, let alone money, to pay much attention to what is new. It’s also a far more speculative venture. Yet…. it is a bridge that must be crossed.

Here’s how I measure a play, in my neophyte terms.  I always try to stay in a B&B that is about a 30-to-45-minute walk from the theatre.  If, on the way home, I am entirely consumed in thinking, because of at least something about the play, then it’s a good play, or at least it is for me at this moment.

Tonight I was.

I saw the final day of the run: three tragedies, three bullets, three corpses; countless tortured souls, vodkas, and laughs; one great day of theatre!

I’m always reading that when it comes to writing characters that have lives of their own, defy being pigeonholed or any sort of authorial agenda, and that are ultimately unfathomable, no one comes near to Shakespeare and then Chekhov.  That’s reason enough to want to see and read Chekhov’s plays.

To those who have, in some measure, touched me as a fellow traveller, however brief may have been the time we have had together, I am writing a New Year’s letter. The letters I have written these last nine years, since I “retired” from the legal profession, have been few. These have been all-consuming years, in the midst of which, and about which, I have hardly known how to speak. For better or worse, I seem to be finding my voice, and I am tempted beyond restraint to share it.

A book review by William G. French, first published 26 May 2013 at VoegelinView.com

I suspect that Glenn Moots is a great fan of Agatha Christie. It is not that his book is a work of fiction, but it certainly does read like a murder mystery. True to the genre, the tale begins with the discovery of a death: in this case, God’s. But this is a detective story with a twist.