Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 4

Getting used to my smart TV

Well, my new TV isn’t perfect, and I’ve been getting to know its quirks and limits as well as its advantages. Sometimes, the TV is slow to find the network when I turn it on, and I have to wait a minute or two for it to sort itself out. Loading the individual streaming apps takes time too. It struck me as ironic that as technology has advanced, TV has regressed to the way it was in my childhood, when TVs still had vacuum tubes and you had to wait for them to warm up before you got a picture.

After the first few days, the TV started glitching. A duplicate image of the central menu bar was stuck in place on the menu screen, staying there when I moved the icons up and down, and I couldn’t access the main settings menu (the “gear” icon). I was also unable to load apps like Hulu and Max. I looked up online how to reboot the TV (I miss printed manuals), and it cleared up the problems, though I don’t know yet if it’ll happen again. Hopefully it was just some post-installation clutter that the reboot cleared up for good. (I’ve noticed the network-not-found issue less since rebooting, so maybe it fixed that too, I hope.)

I’ve also had to figure out how to adjust the image settings, since the dark parts of the image were often way too dark. I found online that it helps to turn off the image “enhancements” that do more harm than good, like dynamic contrast and noise reduction. When I watched a DVD, it was too dark again, and I realized you have to adjust the settings separately for the different inputs. Before I figured that out, though, I just moved over to the other end of the couch, since the image looks brighter from the side. I realized that’s because of how LCDs work — they’re aligned to block the polarized light coming through from behind, so from the side, they get less opaque, same as on a digital watch or calculator.

One cool thing, which probably comes as no surprise to readers used to this tech, is that when I turn on the Blu-Ray player (and even when I first hooked it up without turning it on), the TV automatically turns itself on and switches to the HDMI input. That’s really handy. Of course, I still haven’t watched any actual Blu-Rays, but the DVD image looks great, so I’m not sure I’d even notice the difference.

After experimenting a bit with moving my computer chair in front of the couch so I could sit closer, I decided I’m more comfortable sitting back on my couch so I can see the full image more clearly (given my weak left eye narrowing my field of vision). The 32-inch screen really is the best size for my purposes. I get that other people might prefer big screens to get a movie-theater experience, but I prefer to sit far enough back in the theater to see the whole screen.

I still haven’t had any real occasion to watch live TV. It turns out there are live feeds available in the apps for the various networks and elsewhere, enough that the antenna may well be redundant. Anyway, the few network shows I’d want to watch live don’t premiere until October or November.

I’ve been interrupted a few times by a message saying the TV had insufficient memory to install an unspecified app. It turned out that apparently my TV’s memory was almost full. I did what I could to clear caches and uninstall a couple of apps I was unlikely to use, but I’ve still got less than 1 GB of free space out of just over 4 GB, which seems surprisingly small. I suspect I may need to buy a flash drive to keep in its USB port if this happens again.

Thoughts on Legendary’s GODZILLA x KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE (Spoilers)

After the mindless pile of nonsense that was Godzilla vs. Kong, I wasn’t looking forward to director Adam Wingard’s return for the sequel, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (the “x” is silent, apparently). In the wake of the brilliance of Godzilla Minus One, I had even more reservations. But I’ve come this far in my kaiju review series, and I feel obligated to be comprehensive. Plus I recently renewed my subscription to Max and found that they were showing it, and I just got my first HDTV, so I could hope there’d at least be some cool spectacle. As it happens, I was pleasantly surprised.

The New Empire shares director Wingard and screenwriter Terry Rossio with GvK, though the other credited writers (Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater, with Wingard getting a story credit) are new. As usual, the series has trouble holding onto its human cast members for more than two films, as only GvK’s Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, and Kaylee Hottie are back this time. The MonsterVerse has been brought to you today by the letter H, I guess.

The film picks up with Kong living alone in the Hollow Earth, where we left him last time. He’s pursued by a pack of giant animals (apparently not large enough to qualify as Titans) called Wart Dogs, but turns out to be leading them into a pitfall trap as a way of hunting for his dinner. Even without dialogue, it’s clear that Kong is lonely, looking in vain for others of his kind. In parallel, Jia (Hottie), the last survivor of the Skull Island Iwi Tribe and adopted daughter of Dr. Ilene Andrews (Hall), struggles to fit in at school and feels she doesn’t belong anywhere, though Ilene insists they belong with each other. (The extinction of the rest of the Iwi was alluded to in GvK, but cursorily enough that its prequel comic was able to retcon that they were evacuated before the storm that destroyed their home. This film definitively invalidates that retcon.) As for Godzilla, he’s protecting the Earth’s surface from Titans, but not caring a whit about property damage — except for the Colisseum in Rome, which he’s made his nest, curling up to sleep inside it in a way reportedly inspired by the director’s cat.

Jia is receiving visions of a pattern that matches a mysterious signal the Monarch base in the Hollow Earth is registering. Desperate for outside-the-box thinking to help her daughter, Ilene goes to Bernie Hayes (Henry), the podcaster/conspiracy nut who helped save the day in GvK, and asks for his help solving the mystery. (Really? There are no suitably outside-the-box thinkers within Monarch?) In exchange, he wants recognition for his accomplishments, for no one believed him after the last time.

Kong surfaces at a Monarch base in Barbados for help with a toothache, and Ilene calls in her old flame Trapper Beasley (Dan Stevens of Legion), a free-spirited, hippie-ish Titan veterinarian, to sedate Kong and implant a prosthetic fang. In Rome, Godzilla awakens, and there’s concern that the intensely territorial King of the Monsters might be coming to attack Kong for violating their uneasy truce where Goji gets the surface and Kong gets the Hollow Earth. But Bernie thinks Goji’s responding the same telepathic distress signal Jia’s picking up. Goji attacks a nuclear plant to absorb its power (similar to The Return of Godzilla and Gamera, though it’s a new trick for Legendary Godzilla), and later kills an arctic Titan called Tiamat (previously seen in the comic Godzilla: Dominion after being name-dropped in graphics in the second movie) and starts absorbing its distinctive pink-glowing energy. The Monarch observers conclude he’s charging up for something.

Ilene leads a team into the Hollow Earth including Trapper, Bernie and Jia (who both improbably convinced her to let them come), and a token arrogant authority figure that you can tell in advance is going to get eaten by a monster — although once it happens, we do get some nice character moments with Bernie coping with the shock and the unflappable Trapper comforting him while being philosophical about the inevitability of death, as one would imagine a Titan veterinarian would have to be.

The team finds the Monarch base destroyed by unknown assailants who left a Kong-like bloody handprint. Kong, meanwhile, finds that his pit trap from before collapsed an opening into a second hidden subterranean realm further down from the Hollow Earth. (Ohh-kay…) Investigating, he finds an orange-furred juvenile giant ape, known behind the scenes as Suko (probably short for musuko, Japanese for son, as in Son of Kong), who turns out to be bait for an attack by a few other giant apes who look hungry, downtrodden, and desperate. Kong saves one of them from falling off a cliff in their fight, but the ape attacks him again and Kong has to kill him. Kong drives them off and demands that Suko take him to wherever they came from. Still mistrusting, Suko leads him into a trap, abandoning him to be eaten by a lake monster, but is surprised when Kong kills the monster and offers him a piece of it to eat instead of punishing him. It’s clear just from their design and performance capture/animation that Suko and the others are abuse victims, defensive and terrified, unfamiliar with the benevolence Kong is capable of. The fights aren’t just random action scenes, but establish story and character, even without words.

Ilene’s group finds ruins that Jia recognizes as Iwi, and they soon discover a whole thriving Iwi civilization, all mute and telepathic. The film reveals that these Iwi are Mothra’s worshippers and guardians of her temple, conflating them with the Infant Island tribe in the Toho movies. (I suppose this kind of makes sense, since King Kong vs. Godzilla and Mothra vs. Godzilla were pretty much two consecutive versions of the same plot.) Ilene interprets the writings in their temple, conveniently expositing that humans, giant apes, and other Titans lived in harmony until an evil ape called the Skar King [sic] tried to conquer the surface, almost killing Godzilla before he and his tribe were trapped in the sub-Hollow Earth. (The film assumes Godzilla is one of a kind, disregarding the skeleton of another member of his species seen in the 2014 film.)

While this is going on, Suko leads Kong to where the Skar King has a whole tribe of giant apes toiling as slave labor. Once Kong sees SK’s ruthlessness, he takes action, but SK has a whip weapon made from a Titan’s spinal column and ending in a sharp glowing crystal that he uses to control a Titan that the Iwi mural calls Shimo, basically a quadrupedal, albinistic cousin species of Godzilla with ice breath instead of atomic breath. (I thought it was a variant on Anguirus, but apparently the designers based her on polar bears and Komodo dragons.) Implicitly the crystal is one of Shimo’s spines and somehow enables Skar King to enforce her obedience, though Kong’s Godzilla-scale axe (from GvK) doesn’t seem to have that power. Shimo freezes Kong’s right arm, injuring it badly and forcing him and Suko to retreat without Kong’s axe. Suko helps Kong escape the pursuers, now clearly an ally.

Ilene sees Jia bonding with the Iwi and fears she’ll have to leave her here with her people, while Trapper asks Bernie if it’s wise to release the documentary he’s recording and reveal this isolated tribe to the world, telling him that it’s enough that Bernie knows what he’s accomplished. They’re interrupted when Kong arrives with Suko in tow, drawn to Jia’s presence, and we finally see the reunion between the two Skull Island survivors who’ve been on parallel arcs. Trapper has the idea to heal and reinforce Kong’s frostbitten arm by encasing it in a robotic armature “B.E.A.S.T. Glove” that Ilene’s Monarch team had conveniently already built as a prototype for some kind of giant mech suit to help Kong fight tougher foes. It’s a hell of a weird idea, but I guess it sells toys.

The recovered Kong realizes that Skar King and Shimo still outmatch him without Godzilla’s help, so he surfaces through a portal, coincidentally right next to the Great Pyramids of Giza (by the universal prinicple that giant monsters are drawn to famous landmarks). Godzilla — who’s finished absorbing Tiamat’s energy and emerged in a new, pink-glowing “Godzilla Evolved” form — senses him and swims clear from Gibraltar to attack him. The fight is a lot of big gratuitous action and Pyramid destruction, but there’s kind of a fun character focus to it as Kong is all “Hey, just calm down and listen and follow me into the portal” and Goji will have none of it and is just rampaging.

But the Iwi have guided Jia to fulfill her prophesied role to be the herald that awakens the next generation of Mothra (which ignores the implied role of Zhang Ziyi’s twin characters in King of the Monsters), and much like in Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, the awakened Mothra arrives just in time to save Kong and convince Goji that they need to work together against their common foe. (Sadly, composers Tom Holkenborg & Antonio Di Iorio don’t use Mahara Mosura as Mothra’s theme as Michael Giacchino did in KotM, instead just doing a pastiche melody. Godzilla’s theme isn’t used either this time.)

The Iwi use their mastery of the crystals that influence gravity in the Hollow Earth to create a temporary period of weightlessness in which Kong and Godzilla do battle with Skar King and Shimo, for no particular reason beyond the filmmakers thinking it would be cool. (Logically, the amphibious Godzilla has the easiest time “swimming” in microgravity, while the apes handle it more like brachiators, leaping between floating boulders. That’s probably the only logical thing about the sequence.) Meanwhile, Mothra protects our human heroes from the collateral damage. The battle eventually moves through a vortex to Rio de Janeiro, because of course there has to be a climactic scene of massive city destruction with complete disregard for the human casualties. But Kong’s axe is left behind in the Iwi compound. Kong manages to break Shimo’s control crystal free of the spine-whip and he and Skar King compete to grab it, until Suko arrives with the axe and smashes the crystal, freeing Shimo from slavery. Shimo combines her efforts with Kong’s and Godzilla’s to slay Skar King once and for all.

Afterward, Ilene is ready to leave Jia with her people, but Jia says she’s staying with her mother. Kong and Suko return with the liberated Shimo and show the apes that they’re now free. And Goji goes back to sleep in the Colisseum. Bernie and Trapper get no particular closure, though there were enough hints that those so inclined could imagine they became a couple.

–

Okay, conceptually, this movie was just as much of a big dumb action romp as its predecessor. But it’s a far, far better big dumb action romp. While GvK was an incoherent mess as a result of massive studio meddling and reworking, with arbitrary and illogical plot points and character arcs that were ignored in the second half, GxK:TNE is a far more cohesive narrative. The plot holds together nicely, with some clever setups and payoffs. For instance, Kong’s acceptance of his artificial fang foreshadows his openness to accepting the bionic glove, and an early scene where Trapper uses the Monarch vehicle’s camouflage function to blend in with a flock of giant Hollow Earth avians pays off in the climax when he uses it to draw them in to run interference against Skar King. The story also feels much more character-driven than GvK, if not quite as much as Kong: Skull Island. I’m particularly impressed by the strong sense of character and storytelling in the long wordless CGI sequences with Kong and the other apes. A wealth of information is conveyed through character design, expression, and body language, giving a strong sense of the apes as individuals who have clear motives for their actions, rather than just being special-effects monsters fighting for spectacle. Despite the cartoonish absurdity of a lot of the film’s premises and action, it’s an immensely better-constructed piece of fiction than the disastrous misfire that preceded it.

The film also finally breaks Legendary’s bad habit of needing to center every MonsterVerse film around an obligatory white male lead who’s less interesting or more obnoxious than the other characters around him. While Dan Stevens is added as the token white guy this time, he’s billed third after Hall and Henry, and he remains merely a supporting character to Ilene, Jia, and Bernie. Really, the male lead of this film is Kong, whose storyline carries at least as much of the film’s emotional weight as Ilene and Jia’s does. The only other significant human characters are Mikael (Alex Ferris), the token authority-figure sacrifice; the Iwi Queen (Fala Chen), who has no dialogue; and Monarch director Hampton (Rachel House), who’s mainly just there for exposition. Kevin Copeland (Mayor Daniels from Power Rangers Beast Morphers) plays a submarine commander in a couple of scenes. The film deserves credit for having the most diverse core cast yet in a MonsterVerse movie, even if most of the human cast is fairly unimportant.

I’m also glad that the film addresses and corrects the previous film’s callous, throwaway offscreen extermination of the Iwi culture, even if the way the civilization is revealed to have survived is rather fanciful and plays into a number of old-school tropes about exotic hidden civilizations. Having them all be mute, treated more as exotica for the Western characters to marvel at than as individual characters, isn’t a great choice either, doubling down on how they were portrayed in Kong: Skull Island. But it’s better than wiping out an entire society as a plot convenience.

Still, I’m not a fan of the MonsterVerse’s turn toward more over-the-top, cartoonish action fluff, even with the better grounding in character this time. It struck me how casual the film was about Godzilla firing his atomic breath over and over again, in contrast to Godzilla Minus One where it only happens two or three times and is a devastating, transformative event when it occurs. Really, the film treats Godzilla as routine, making him one of its least memorable elements, a second or third banana despite getting top billing.

But at least GxK:TNE managed to be a fairly good bit of action fluff, reassuring me that the incoherent inanity of GvK was a fluke rather than the new normal. Now that I know Wingard can make an effective Godzilla/Kong movie, it deepens my regret that the original version of GvK was so totally hacked to pieces. If we could get a director’s cut of that one, it might be so much better.

Smart TV gotten!

After thinking it over and doing my research, I decided to get a 32-inch smart TV, since a 40-inch set would require buying a separate center mount to fit on my A/V stand, and that would cost at least twice as much as a 32-incher by itself. The nearest store that had a haul-away service for my heavy old TV was a fair drive away, but that gave me a chance to get to know my new phone mount for the car a little better. (I had to move it further to the right than I had it before, to avoid my hand knocking into it when I move it to the gear shifter. In that position, it’s not at an ideal focusing distance for my progressive eyeglass lenses, but I can see the GPS route and instructions clearly enough, even if the fine text is a bit blurry.)

I picked out an Amazon Fire TV, partly because it was the least expensive model, partly because it goes with my existing Prime Video account (which I just started last week), and partly because its support legs looked sturdier than the ones on the more expensive Roku model and were a bit closer together, so they’d fit better on my A/V stand (though I had to move my phonograph back a little to make room for it). I also bought a digital optical audio cable to go to my receiver, and an RCA-style video cable to replace the stereo audio cable I was using half of to go from my receiver’s Video Out to the TV. I also went ahead and bought their least expensive digital antenna, though I wasn’t sure I’d need it.

I was expecting that I could get the haul-away service on the same day, but the earliest they could make it was Thursday. So I had the choice of either waiting 2 days to install the new TV or figuring out a way to at least move my old 62-pound CRT set down to the floor without hurting my back. I ended up using my computer-desk chair — I raised it to its highest level, eased the set off the A/V stand sideways onto the seat, very carefully rotated and lowered the chair, then eased the TV off to the floor — though I didn’t avoid banging the screen into the corner of the wooden stand, so I’m lucky it didn’t bang very hard.

The 32-inch set looked small in the store, but it’s actually just the right size for viewing from my couch. Since I don’t see well out of my left eye, that narrows my field of view a bit, so I don’t really need a wider screen. I spent most of Tuesday afternoon setting the TV up and getting a feel for it. It had some trouble loading its software updates due to my slow-ish internet connection, but it plays shows smoothly enough, though in one case the resolution was variable (though I was downloading the Fire app on my smartphone at the time, so I could use my phone keyboard to type text into the TV; maybe there was bandwidth competition). The TV is only HD instead of “Full HD,” but I can’t really tell the difference. I think it looks pretty good, certainly a dang sight better than my old set.

I found out that the TV had a built-in option to subscribe to free apps for the broadcast networks and some cable channels, which I expect will let me watch new episodes next-day if not live, like the online websites. If so, that makes me wonder if I should’ve bothered to buy the digital antenna. But it occurred to me that the antenna could be worth having as a backup in case my internet goes out, which it sometimes does. It wouldn’t let me access my streaming services, of course, but I could watch live shows, follow news and weather if necessary, etc. I did a little sampling of what the antenna had to offer when I was testing the audio connection to my receiver, and most of the channels came through okay, though one was badly posterized — I guess that was from a more distant antenna. (And there were commercials on almost every channel while I was trying to find an actual show. I’d forgotten how endless the commercials on live TV are. When I was a kid, ads took up no more than 10 minutes per hour; now it’s typically twice that.)

The audio connection to my receiver works fine, considering I’d never even heard of digital optical audio cables until I studied my receiver’s manual more closely last week. But the universal remote I’ve been using to control the receiver chose that day for its volume-down button to stop working. And the reason I use a universal is because the volume buttons on the original remote stopped working years ago. The volume buttons are always the ones I use most, so it’s no wonder they wear out fast. As it happens, the universal I’ve been using is the one that came with my old cable box, which they let me keep when I cancelled cable. So I couldn’t replace that model. I found a remote on eBay that should replace the original remote, but it might take a couple of weeks to get here. Until then, I may have to turn down the volume manually with the knob on the receiver (turning it up and muting still work on the remote), though I guess I could go back to the TV’s inbuilt speakers, which are decent, I guess. (Maybe I should’ve bought Bluetooth headphones along with the rest.)

The other thing I wanted to check right away was whether the TV would get the aspect ratio right for my DVD player — whether it would show 4:3 shows in the proper ratio (“pillarboxed”) rather than stretched wide to fit the screen. Turns out that my player is so old that it’s natively 4:3, and anything in 16:9 shows as letterboxed within the pillarboxed 4:3 frame on the smart TV, so it’s the right ratio but too small. And I couldn’t find a setting on the TV that would zoom it in, I guess because it’s just serving as a monitor and the DVD player is controlling the picture shape.

So this finally gave me an opportunity to try out the Blu-Ray/DVD player I inherited when my father passed away 14 years ago, but which has been gathering dust on a shelf because I couldn’t get it to work with my receiver’s available inputs. My father had earlier given me a couple of HDMI cables just in case I ever had need of them, so I was able to hook the Blu-Ray player directly up to the TV with one of those, and I was pleased to discover that it actually worked, and indeed the TV automatically turned itself on and offered to switch to HDMI when I plugged it in. It plays 16:9 DVDs in fullscreen and 4:3 ones properly pillarboxed, so I guess it’s my permanent replacement for the DVD player — and now I can finally watch Blu-Rays, I guess. Which means I’ll only need that new RCA video cable if I want to watch one of my old tapes on my VHS player. (Kind of a shame, since the DVD player is very flat and fits perfectly underneath the smart TV. I’d long wanted to move it there because it didn’t always pick up remote signals well in its cubbyhole lower down on the A/V stand, and now that I finally get to move it there, I don’t need it anymore. I might keep it around as a backup, though.)

One possible negative is that the picture actually looks a little darker when I’m sitting right in front of the screen than when I’m off to the side or standing up looking down at it. I suppose the lighting is coming from the sides, or something. But that means I can watch while lying back on the couch in my comfortable position, at least as long as I’m not having a meal on my TV tray (or using the headphones that plug into the receiver, whose cord is just a bit too short to reach the couch, so I have to roll my computer chair over). I ended up turning the brightness down to 50% anyway when I realized it was straining my eyes.

The TV has one other minor annoyance that’s also been an issue with some streaming sites on my computer: Turning the subtitles on and off applies to an entire streaming service, rather than to individual shows. So if I turn on the subs for watching a Japanese show, say, I have to turn them back off again when I start a different show, or just get used to having them on.

Still, for the most part, I’m happy with the new TV. It’s a much better viewing experience than my computer monitor or certainly my old TV, even if it’s not Full HD. And I’m glad I talked myself out of getting a 40-inch set, since it turns out it would’ve been too big for my viewing comfort. I may have spent a little more than I needed with the antenna and video cable, on top of needing to pay for the haul-away service and the unexpected need to buy a new remote, but the TV itself was inexpensive enough to balance that out, yet still satisfactory.

Get smart TV?

First-world problems: I’m thinking seriously about finally replacing my two-decade-old CRT television set with a smart TV. Ever since I gave up cable, I’ve only used my TV to watch DVDs, while watching streaming shows on my computer monitor. My understanding is that smart TVs usually have web browsers as well as built-in streaming services, so it would be good to be able to watch a larger screen from my couch. But there are a number of issues to sort out first.

The issue that outweighs all others, literally, is that the 25-inch CRT is too heavy for me to lift, which is a large part of why I haven’t replaced it already. I’d been hoping I could find a store whose delivery people would take the TV away, but apparently nobody does that anymore. Though when I asked, I was told there are junk hauling services I could call. That might be the best option, since they could get rid of some other old stuff cluttering my closets.

The other main issue is that my equally old A/V receiver, which my speakers come out of, does not have HDMI ports. It mainly uses RCA coaxial inputs for video/audio, which might work if I could find an HDMI-to-RCA adapter. But it also has inputs for digital optical audio cables, which seem to be compatible with smart TV outputs. I think that would work, but the receiver’s instruction book recommends using coax instead of optical, without saying why. Maybe it’s because optical was a newer technology then? It’s probably more reliable now.

If digital optical or HDMI-to-RCA didn’t work, I guess my other options would be to rely on the TV’s inbuilt speakers (though apparently those tend to be pretty poor), or to buy a separate speaker bar just for the TV. That would add significantly to the cost, but considerably less so than buying a new receiver.

Size-wise, the largest screen I could fit in the available space would be 40 inches, but it looks like that would only work with a center stand rather than the wide-set legs that appear to be the default. If I couldn’t find one with a center stand, I’d have to pay extra to buy one — which might be worth it for stability alone, since it sounds like the default legs on smart TVs tend to be flimsy. A 32-inch set would fit my space better, and would still be about 1/3 larger than my current screen, but I think 40 would be preferable. Apparently sets between those sizes are rare.

One thing I’m still unsure of is whether a smart TV would let me watch regular network TV. I gather that some smart TVs let you install apps for viewing network shows, or something. I could buy an inexpensive digital antenna to watch local stations, but I recall that they always superimpose distracting logos, ads, and text crawls over the picture, as well as having a ton of commercials.

Of course, one of the very first things I’d have to figure out is how to disable motion smoothing, so that film would still look like film. Apparently it’s turned on by default and different models have different terms for it. I’m also a little worried about aspect ratio, since I remember that some widescreen TVs I’ve seen in years past were set to stretch out 4:3 programs to widescreen ratio by default, distorting the image, and I don’t want that. But that seems to be less of an issue with newer TVs. At least, when I watch 4:3 shows online, they’re always in the right ratio with blank space on the sides, so hopefully watching streaming smart TV would be the same.

Naturally I’m open to advice or suggestions about any of these matters, particularly from Cincinnati residents who could recommend a good store or a good junk hauler.

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 4

Jonathan Miller’s second and final full season as producer of the BBC Television Shakespeare was its shortest and most scattered, with only three plays airing a bit over a month apart from October to December 1981. Let’s get right into it.

Othello

Different productions over the decades have taken a variety of approaches to the problem of casting Othello. The language used for ethnicity in Shakespeare’s day was vague, so it’s hard to say whether the “Moor” was meant to be a North African Arab as we understand the term, or a sub-Saharan African as some of the textual description suggests. There are lines calling him “black,” but Elizabethans used that to mean anyone browner than themselves. There’s evidence that the earliest artistic renderings of the character tended to depict him as sub-Saharan, but it’s unclear. Many notable white actors, including Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, played the role in brownface or blackface at a time when that was considered acceptable; but many Black actors have played the role as well, notably James Earl Jones, who played the role many times onstage from the 1950s onward. (The role has also been played on stage and screen by a who’s who of great genre stars, including Yaphet Kotto, Denzel Washington, Lawrence Fishburne, Avery Brooks, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.) But even in modern times, the role has often been assayed by white actors with their normal skin tone, including Sir Patrick Stewart in 1997. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othello_(character) )

Cedric Messina, the producer of seasons 1-2, tried to get Jones to reprise the role for this series, which would’ve completed its set of original-trilogy Darth Vader performers, since we had David Prowse in As You Like It and Sebastian Shaw in Timon of Athens. But the British Actors’ Equity Association wouldn’t let them cast non-British actors, so the play was postponed. When Jonathan Miller got his hands on it, rather than casting a British actor of color, he chose Anthony Hopkins. Wikipedia alleges that Miller (who directed as well as producing) “decided that the play was not about race at all,” but that’s belied by his unfortunate choice to put Hopkins in swarthy makeup with a shaggy black wig and darkened eye sockets, giving him a wild, scary-eyed look to contrast with Hopkins’s cool and elegant delivery in the role — though there are moments when Hopkins plays Othello’s jealous rages with “savage” snarls, which lands really badly in context of the makeup. BritBox adds a disclaimer at the beginning acknowledging this as a controversial episode, the last time Othello was played by a white actor in a British TV production. The disclaimer throws in the usual line that it was “a product of its time,” though that’s not really valid considering that actors like Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones had been playing Othello for literally decades by that point, and the use of blackface/brownface makeup in film and TV had fallen out of favor by the 1970s, at least in the US. Even for its time, this was backward.

Despite the problematical casting and makeup, Anthony Hopkins is one of the biggest names to appear in this series so far, and he’s accompanied by a couple of other well-known yet unexpected actors. Iago — a role I played in our high school English class read-through of Othello — is played by the great Bob Hoskins (Hook, Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Desdemona is played by Penelope Wilton, and I can already hear the Doctor Who fans saying “Yes, we know who she is.” (Namely, Harriet Jones, Prime Minister, in the early seasons of the modern series.) The supporting role of Montano, Othello’s predecessor as governor of Cyprus, is played by Tony Steedman, who was Socrates (or rather, “So-crates”) in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

The plot is well-known. Iago resents his superior Othello, a great Moorish warrior who’s gained renown and status in the army of Venice, partly because of racism but also because he resents Othello for promoting Cassio (David Yelland) above him, and because he suspects Othello (probably falsely) of sleeping with his wife Emilia (Rosemary Leach). When Othello elopes with Desdemona just before the play starts, Iago manipulates her disapproving father into accusing Othello of bewitching her with foreign sorcery, which she and Othello debunk quickly enough. When Othello is appointed governor of Cyprus, Iago schemes with his ally Roderigo (Anthony Pedley), who wanted Desdemona for himself, to discredit both Cassio and Othello. First, Iago goads Cassio into a drunk-and-disorderly rap that gets him fired, then he insinuates to Othello that Cassio’s sleeping with Desdemona, so that Othello misinterprets Des’s entreaties on Cassio’s behalf as proof of their affair. Othello is way too trusting of Iago, who poisons his mind while playing the loyal friend, and not nearly trusting enough of his wife. Naturally it all ends in tragedy, with Othello strangling Desdemona before Emilia figures out that Iago set it all up, for which Iago kills her, before a guilty Othello kills himself and Iago is dragged away for punishment.

This is definitely one of Shakespeare’s best, with rich characters and a potent story. In his day, characters in drama were often expected to be archetypes, with no particular reason for their behavior except that it was their assigned role. But these characters have believable, human motivations. Iago is driven by jealousy and resentment at being subordinate to those he considers his inferiors, whether in ethnicity like Othello or in intellect and ability like Cassio. Othello is a heroic, noble figure, belying the stereotypes projected onto him by the Venetians, but being an outsider makes him insecure about his worth in others’ eyes, and thus susceptible to the fear that the new wife he adores might not truly love him in return, an insecurity that Iago preys upon. Desdemona is a more archetypal figure, perhaps, unshakeably pure and loyal to her husband no matter the provocation, though she has a lovely scene with Emilia where the latter says that men shouldn’t be surprised that women have the same urges and flaws that they do, and that men should try harder to live up to the standards they hold their wives to.

This production under Miller’s direction is mostly quite well-done, an improvement on the often clumsy productions in season 3. There’s some effective staging and shot composition, though they still haven’t fixed the problem with actors further from the camera being hard to hear. The biggest problem by far, though, is the brownface fright makeup on Anthony Hopkins, which is distracting and makes it hard to take him seriously in the role. (He also spends the entire final act wearing a distractingly large codpiece, which might be period-authentic, but come on.) Hopkins is fairly good, but I found his performance inauthentic, going from his usual cool, mannered delivery to intense fury or weeping with little transition; it’s more surface than substance. I imagine that the more experienced Hopkins of today could give a more textured and believable performance — much like how Sir Patrick Stewart’s King Claudius in the 2009 TV production of Hamlet was immensely richer and more nuanced than his Claudius in this series’s 1980 production of the play. But I don’t think it’s a role Hopkins should have played in the first place, so I have no interest in seeing him reprise it.

Bob Hoskins, on the other hand, is compellingly brilliant as Iago. My usual mental image of Iago is Paul Darrow, who played Avon on Blake’s 7, an antihero known for his cold cynicism and Machiavellian amorality. I’ve also often thought that the way Jonathan Harris played Dr. Smith in the earliest episodes of Lost in Space, when he was a cunning and ruthless villain feigning benevolence rather than the buffoonish coward he later became, would be a good model for Iago. But Hoskins has changed my mind. After all, the key to Iago’s effectiveness is that Othello and his other compatriots all trust him absolutely, seeing him as a loyal friend and never suspecting his duplicity. Hoskins gives Iago a cheerfully endearing surface persona, making it no wonder that his victims trust him. His true self exposed in soliloquies is more calculating and hateful, but Hoskins approached him as a Rumpelstiltskin figure, a laughing trickster taking wicked glee in his schemes. It’s a marvelous interpretation. Hoskins’s working-class accent also gives his Iago an interesting texture. There’s a sense of his Iago as a blue-collar guy angry about foreigners stealing his job and driven to malice by it — although usually it’s the rich people in power provoking the blue-collar working stiffs to hate foreigners, while in this case Iago is the one doing the provoking.

Seeing this makes me regret, even more than I already did, that we never saw Hoskins play the Penguin in a Batman movie. An authentic portrayal of the Penguin, as opposed to the reimagined Tim Burton version, would be a funny-looking, seemingly innocuous little man whose amiable facade masks a ruthless criminal mastermind. He’s also often portrayed as a low-class thug with pretentions of sophistication. Hoskins’s Iago fits both those descriptions quite well, although his gleeful malevolence reminds me more of the Joker. (My other ideal candidate for an authentic 1980s Penguin, ironically, would have been Danny DeVito. I regret that Burton cast the perfect actor for the character and then transformed them both beyond recognition.)

Penelope Wilton is also superb as Desdemona, making her a warm, dignified, thoughtful figure, a woman clearly deserving of respect and undeserving of what becomes of her. She’s one of the most appealing female leads in this series so far. Wilton’s romantic chemistry with Hopkins’s Othello is pretty good, but again, that damn distracting makeup for Othello gets in the way of appreciating it. Her most potent scene is the one with Emilia. Even though she’s mostly just singing and sitting thoughtfully while Emilia monologues, she’s compelling to watch.

Overall, this could’ve easily been the best installment of the series to date, if not for the problematical casting and makeup of Othello, which really hurts it. I couldn’t help but wonder what James Earl Jones would’ve done in Hopkins’s place.

Troilus and Cressida

This one is new to me, though I’m kind of surprised it was never covered in my high school or college courses, since apparently it’s an intriguingly unusual play with a complex history. It’s often considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” because it’s unclear what category it is; different texts have lumped it in with the tragedies, the histories, or the comedies (where my Riverside puts it), while some scholars propose a distinct category for it, satire. There’s conflicting evidence on whether it was ever performed at all in Shakespeare’s day, and apparently it was rarely if ever performed between then and the 20th century except in heavily rewritten forms. It became popular in the 20th century, perhaps because its cynical take on the Trojan War resonated with audiences in the era of the World Wars.

Anyway, this is Shakespeare’s take on both the Homeric Trojan War and the medieval invention of the doomed romance between Troilus (who’s in the original myths) and Cressida (who isn’t), with Chaucer’s version of that tale being one of the Bard’s main sources. Charles Gray, whom we’ve seen as the Duke of York in Richard II and the title role in Julius Caesar, adopts a flamboyantly gay persona as Pandarus, who tries to set up his niece Cressida (Suzanne Burden) with King Priam’s youngest son, Prince Troilus (Anton Lesser, Star Wars: Andor‘s Major Partagaz), who’s madly in love with her. Cressida seems to resist, but confides to the audience that she loves Troilus back and is just playing hard-to-get. Meanwhile, in the Greek camp (which director Jonathan Miller chose to depict as an Elizabethan version of M*A*S*H‘s 4077th), there’s an extended comic subplot of Agamemnon and his generals trying to convince Achilles (Kenneth Haigh) to stop sulking in his tent and accept the challenge of single combat with the Trojan (or “Troyan,” per Shakespeare) hero Hector (John Shrapnel, who was Alcibiades in Timon of Athens, so he can’t seem to stop picking fights with Greeks). Agamemnon is Vernon Dobtcheff from Doctor Who: “The War Games,” previously seen in this series in Romeo and Juliet. Ulysses, portrayed here as the most intelligent “Greekish” leader but also the most long-winded, is played by Benjamin Whitrow, whom I know mainly as the original voice of Fowler in Aardman’s Chicken Run, and who comes off here as a sort of off-brand Alec Guinness. The clown Thersites, who serves as a literal Greek chorus commenting on events in the camp, is played by Jack Birkett under his stage name The Amazing Orlando. Birkett plays the character with a “drag queen” voice that sounds uncannily like Nabil Shaban as Doctor Who‘s recurring villain Sil. He gives one of the most annoying performances in this series so far, and there were times I just wanted Thersites to shut up.

Cressida is entirely absent from Act 2, where Troilus’s role is to argue against returning Helen to Menelaus, which makes him rather unsympathetic from my point of view, since he’s literally arguing in favor of not releasing a kidnapped woman — which is probably meant as an ironic setup for what happens later. Shakespeare did not include Helen in this scene, but in this production, Helen (Ann Pennington) is present as a mute spectator to the debate, making it even dehumanizing that the Trojan royal family are talking about her as a captured prize and a commodity to be traded. (Helen does have dialogue later in the play, but only briefly.)

Troilus finally gets Cressida to admit her feelings, Pandarus witnesses their marriage (or so it seems, though there’s no priest or anything involved), and they consummate their love. But the Greeks and Trojans negotiate a prisoner swap in which Cressida is given as a prize to Diomedes (Paul Moriarty). Troilus oddly doesn’t raise much protest, just going along meekly to handing the love of his life over as a sex slave, and like a typical hypocritical male, he’s outraged when he later visits the Greek camp during a truce and witnesses Cressida making nice with Diomedes and confessing to herself that she likes his looks. Troilus writes her off angrily and she vanishes from the narrative, but Troilus determines to avenge himself on Diomedes. Strangely, their battle ends inconclusively offstage while the play refocuses on Achilles siccing his gang of Myrmidons on an unarmed Hector and then claiming to have done the killing himself. (In the Iliad, Troilus was slain by Achilles, which was his main claim to fame until Cressida was retconned into the story.)

This is a strangely unfocused play, resolving only its B-plot while its title story fizzles out. I’d be tempted to think it was unfinished, but Wikipedia says that previous versions of the tale also write out Cressida after her betrayal, giving her no real resolution. But I think this production handles her more sympathetically. Suzanne Burden is appealing in the role, not played as devious or fickle. When she’s first brought into the Greek camp as Diomedes’ captive, Shakespeare has all the leaders (except Ulysses) kiss her, and Miller’s production also has the common soldiers mobbing her in a sexually threatening way, so that her playing along seems like an act of self-defense, a woman forced into sex slavery adapting as best she can in order to survive. That makes it hard to condemn her — as does the fact that Troilus made no effort to protect her from this, so really, why should she be loyal to him?

In any case, Troilus may be a jerk and a hypocrite, but Anton Lesser is excellent in the role. In the first act, he’s far more convincing at selling romantic melancholy than Patrick Ryecart was as Romeo back in season 1. The young Lesser reminds me of another Anton, the late, great Anton Yelchin. John Shrapnel is also impressively strong as Hector; I think I might have preferred it if he’d been cast as Ulysses, though this play seems to favor the Trojans more as strong, heroic figures, aside from the effete Pandarus. The Greeks are played more as bickering sitcom characters, useless without Achilles, who’s a slacker anyway and turns out to be a complete cad.

Three cast members from last week’s Othello are back this week. Anthony Pedley (Roderigo) is the Greek hero Ajax, played here as a big dumb strongman. The elderly Nestor is played by Geoffrey Chater, who was Desdemona’s father Brabantio. Bill and Ted‘s Tony Steedman is Aeneas — though it seems odd to cast a man in his mid-50s as the hero of the Aeneid, especially when he looks even older.

I’ve been keeping track of actors who appeared in Doctor Who and other genre productions, but this play has a different kind of Doctor Who connection. In the lost 1965 serial “The Myth Makers,” set at the end of the Trojan War (and surviving in audio recordings and a novelization), the Doctor’s companion Vicki was written out of the show by having her take the alias Cressida, fall in love with Troilus, and go off with him and Aeneas to found Rome. It’s quite different from how the play went, and it’s odd that writer Donald Cotton chose to identify a departing series lead with a literary archetype of an unfaithful woman. (This may have been at the behest of script editor Donald Tosh, who was annoyed by the actress’s complaints about her dialogue.) The chronology of the serial is quite different too, since it opens where the play ended, with Achilles killing Hector by cheating (when Hector is distracted by the arrival of the TARDIS). Both versions of the story take a similarly satirical tone, however, and are similar in their portrayals of Ulysses/Odysseus as the Greeks’ resident schemer, though the “Myth Makers” version is more piratical.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is another of the best-known plays, and another one we read through in high school English, though I don’t remember which character I played. I may have been Puck, or maybe Oberon.

This is unusual among Shakespeare’s plays in not being an adaptation of a prior work, though it draws on characters and ideas from Greek mythology, medieval romance, and English folklore, most particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” It seems to have been written as a celebration of May and summer festivals, perhaps to be performed at one, though some have speculated it was written to commemorate someone’s wedding, given its focus on themes of love and marriage.

It’s also probably Shakespeare’s silliest comedy, basically a bedroom farce without the bedrooms, set in a very Elizabethan version of ancient Athens (with Miller going for Elizabethan-era sets and costumes as usual). Pippa Guard (who was Miranda in The Tempest and Diana in All’s Well that Ends Well) plays Hermia, who’s in love with Lysander (Robert Lindsay, previously seen in Twelfth Night and All’s Well, and in the 2013 Atlantis TV series as Daedalus), but whose father wants her to marry her suitor Demetrius (Nicky Henson), who dumped the plainer Helena (Cherith Mellor) when Hermia caught his eye. Duke Theseus (Nigel Davenport), who’s preparing to marry the Amazon queen Hippolyta (Estelle Kohler), decrees that Hermia must either marry Demetrius, get herself to a nunnery, or get executed for defying her father’s will, yikes. So she and Lysander elope, but a spiteful Helena tells Demetrius and they follow them into the woods outside Athens.

This, of course, is the realm of the fairy King Oberon (Peter McEnery) and Queen Titania (Helen Mirren), who are having a custody battle over an infant that Titania swore to took care of after a worshipper of hers died in childbirth, and that Oberon wants to raise as his own changeling page. (Can “changeling” mean the abducted human infant as well as the fairy child replacing it? Shakespeare evidently thought so.) The spiteful Oberon decides to play a trick on Titania with help of his servant Puck (Phil Daniels), using a love potion to make her fall for Nick Bottom (Brian Glover from Alien 3 and Doctor Who: “Attack of the Cybermen”), one of a group of dimwitted “Mechanicals” (i.e. working-class laborers) who are rehearsing a play they hope to perform for the duke. First, though, Puck turns Bottom’s head into that of a donkey (though in this version Glover is just given a furry face and donkey ears).

Meanwhile, for some reason — perhaps regretting his rift with Titania — Oberon observes Helena’s unrequited love for Demetrius and charges Puck to use a love potion to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena, but Oberon’s instructions are ambiguous, so Puck makes Lysander fall for Helena instead. Helena assumes this is a cruel prank, and further comedy mixups ensue until the four are all at each other’s throats, whereupon Oberon puts them to sleep and makes them forget it all. He then patches things up with Titania, because the whole custody thing with the kid was resolved offstage in a disturbingly cavalier way, with Titania just giving up and letting Obie essentially take possession of the kid as his slave. (It’s unclear when this happened, since Titania had been asleep in bed with Bottom for some time before.)

Yet this is only the end of Act IV, since the final act focuses on Bottom and his company putting on their comically inept performance of Pyramus and Thisby, which is funnier than the rest of the play it’s within. My Riverside says this was probably Shakespeare poking fun at the children’s plays he grew up watching, and styles of performance that had fallen out of favor in the more innovative theatrical era Shakespeare helped bring about.

This one is okay, but frivolous and possibly the shortest one yet, at only 1:51. It’s a mostly harmless bit of fluff, and it’s reasonably well directed by Elijah Moshinsky, who previously did All’s Well. The interior sets are lavish (at least one huge hallway seems like it’s probably on location, though Wikipedia claims there was no location filming after season 1), and the forest set, though clearly a set, is more realistic than many of the stylized sets we’ve seen under Miller’s producership. The supporting fairies are played by children, while Puck is played more like an “anti-establishment punk” (as Wikipedia puts it) than the cheerful, whimsical figure of traditional productions. Oberon and Titania are in simple attire rather than regal finery, played with a certain naturalistic wildness.

The musical score is much richer than usual for this series; I’m not sure, but I think they may be using portions of the score Felix Mendelssohn wrote for the play in the 19th century (the source of the traditional “Wedding March”). The credits say the music is by Stephen Oliver, but that could just be a reference to the series theme music. Or it could be that Oliver wrote a Mendelssohn pastiche.

The cast is just okay, with no real standouts. It’s notable in having more diversity in its supporting cast than usual, mainly casting Hugh Quarshie (The Phantom Menace, The Crimes of Grindelwald, Doctor Who: “Daleks in Manhattan”/”Evolution of the Daleks”) as Theseus’s adviser Philostrate. (The other significant genre actor here is Geoffrey Palmer as Peter Quince, the Mechanicals’ playwright; he was in classic Who‘s “The Silurians” and “The Mutants” and the revival’s “Voyage of the Damned.”) I was underwhelmed by Brian Glover (whom I know mainly as Magerfonstein Lugg in Peter Davison’s Campion mystery series) as Bottom. Bottom was my father’s favorite character, and I think he played him in some context once, though I don’t quite remember. I was expecting a more standout comic performance, but Glover was just adequate.

So that’s the end of season 4, but it’s not quite the end of Jonathan Miller’s tenure as producer on the BBC Shakespeare, since he’d produce the first two plays recorded during season 5 (aired third and fourth) before passing the torch to Shaun Sutton for the remainder of the series. Next time, we’ve got Lear, Falstaff, a big chunk of English history, and… Zaphod Beeblebrox?

Adjusting to new stuff

My new phone mount for my car arrived yesterday, and my new bamboo dish drying rack arrived separately later that afternoon, a day or two earlier than expected. While my old phone mount was just a simple bracket that held the phone by its edges and attached to the car’s air vent vanes by friction, making it prone to coming loose or losing its grip on the phone, the new one is more elaborate and effective, with a good-sized cradle that the phone can rest on and be held snugly in place by the releasable side clamps.

It came with two mounts, one for the vent and a rod-and-suction-cup one to attach it to the dashboard or windshield. I tried them both out, though I didn’t actually attach the suction cup, since there’s a rather involved process where I’d have to affix a smooth disk to the textured dash surface and wait a day or two for it to adhere firmly. I just rested it on the dash and tried to get a feel for where the best place to position the phone would be. I thought it might be preferable to the vent option, since I wouldn’t have to look as far to the side to see it. But it turned out that wherever I put it, the phone would block part of my field of view through the windshield. The lowest I could get it to go was pretty close to where it would attach to the vent anyway. And the instructions say the suction cup wouldn’t necessarily hold if the car got too hot, which mine often does.

So I decided to go with the vent clip, which works much better than the old one. It has a hook that you extend by twisting the outer ring, hook under a vane, and tighten back in, and there’s a support ring that locks the vent in position so that it doesn’t sag under the weight of the clip like it did with the old one. So it’s much more secure and firmly positioned, and since it sticks further out from the vent, it’s easier to reach and to read the phone. The one drawback is that in the best position, it blocks my view of the car radio’s clock. The old one had the same issue, and I dealt with it by putting it on the right-hand one of the two central vents instead of the left-hand one, but now I’ve decided just to live with it blocking the clock. I can always just look at my watch, and in the phone’s new position, it may well be easier to read its time display, though that’s pretty small when I’m using GPS.

As for the dish rack, I like it that it’s slightly wider than the old one, yet shorter so that it fits better where I store it. But I wish it weren’t quite so short, since larger items no longer fit on the bottom rack. Also, the slots are a bit narrower, which is perfect for my medium-sized plates but not so great for wider things like my cutting board. There are a couple of wider slots on the ends, but only the two. So I’ll have to make some adjustments. Maybe I could keep using the old rack as a supplement when needed, but it’s not in great shape.

Oh, and I managed to avoid getting a splinter when I took this one out of the package, but I did get a small splinter when I folded it up after putting the dry dishes away.

Meanwhile, I figured something out about my relatively new shoes. They’re the kind that have two sets of eyelets at the ankle, and I had the laces going through the top ones first and then the bottom ones on the opposite sides, and tied from there. I decided to try doing it the other way, lacing them through the bottom ones and then the top ones, and it turns out they’re much more comfortable that way. Which is kind of logical when I think about it, but it took a while to occur to me. They should include instructions on these things.

Two weeks after

Well, it’s been two weeks since Shore Leave ended, and I haven’t gotten sick, so either I wasn’t exposed to COVID at the con, or I was exposed but was asymptomatic. I didn’t want to use up a home test kit if I didn’t have any symptoms, so I don’t know for sure (and I haven’t had any close contact with anyone since then). There were a couple of days this past week when I had a bit of sinus inflammation, but I felt fine otherwise, and there was an air-quality advisory around then, so it was probably related to that, or maybe pollen.

The surprising thing is that I didn’t catch anything at the con. I would’ve expected to catch a cold at least, the usual “con crud,” but I’ve been fine.

I’ve been slow getting back into the swing of writing, since I was kind of stuck and unsure of where I wanted to go with my story in progress, and it’s been hard to focus. I decided not to worry about it and let myself be useless for a few days, since as an introvert I’ve been mentally drained by the convention and needed time to recharge. It’s also been hard to concentrate given how dramatic and encouraging the political news had been these past few weeks. I’ve gotten a bit addicted to hope-scrolling through social media. Still, my story plans have begun to fall into place now and I’m starting to make some progress again.

I’ve ordered that new phone mount for my car, as well as a new folding bamboo drying rack for my dishes, since the old one is falling apart. I tried getting a new one a few months ago, but it turned out to be too small for my needs (and I got a splinter from it when I tried to take it out of the box), so I returned it. This time, I was pickier about size, but it was hard to find one that was at least as wide as the one I have, so it could accommodate the same amount of dishes or more. I found one that’s about 3/4 inch wider, but a little bit shorter, which should actually make it easier to store between uses.

The other day, I found a new solution to a minor problem I’ve had for years. My electric razor’s battery was running down while I was shaving, but the only outlet in my bathroom is in the far right corner of the light fixture over the wide mirror, poorly positioned for plugging the razor in while I shave. But a while back, I bought an emergency portable battery pack with an AC outlet, which I keep in my backpack with my laptop just in case, since my laptop battery’s pretty much dead again and it only works when it’s plugged in. So it occurred to me I could plug the razor into the battery pack and hold the pack in one hand while I shaved with the other. It worked very well. I don’t know if it would’ve occurred to me if I hadn’t had the battery pack’s existence fresh in my mind, both from taking it to Shore Leave and using it to recharge my phone when the power went out on my block recently. I was surprised that it was still reading 99% power after my phone was charged — even though the smaller, older battery pack that I used at Shore Leave ran dry before it had even fully topped up my phone. I guess there have been some improvements in battery storage, or maybe it’s just because the newer one is a lot bigger.

Still waiting for news on the cover to Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories. I’ll let you know as soon as the book is ready.

An eventful Shore Leave

I’m back home and recovering from my trip to the Shore Leave Convention at its new location, the Wyndham Lancaster Resort and Convention Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The drive out was clear and uneventful. Since I’m no longer able to stay with my cousins in the DC area the night before, and since I don’t currently have to worry about money, I split my trip over two days and stayed at a motel which, by chance, was the same one I stayed at on my return trip last year. It was a simpler drive, if a bit costlier, since it was pretty much straight along the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then to the Lincoln Highway (which, coincidentally, is referenced in “The Monsters We Make” in my upcoming collection Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories, although the story’s setting is a couple of hundred miles further west along the highway). The hotel is pretty nice, bigger than the old one, but it’s weirdly structured, with stairs up to the lobby from the entrance and half-flights to get down from the lobby to other places. I’ve heard and read a number of complaints from conventiongoers about the accessibility issues; there are elevators and ramps here and there, but not many. That initial flight of stairs was not a welcoming first sight even to me, a weary traveler with a rolling suitcase, let alone to anyone with mobility issues. It’s bizarre that they designed the hotel that way.

I couldn’t get wifi in my room at first, but it cleared up later. I also found that you couldn’t get streaming video on the room TV, even though that seems to be pretty standard these days. So it’s a little backward in that regard. For food options, there was a Starbucks concession with sandwiches, vending, and the like, smaller than the one at the old Hunt Valley Inn, and a food cart opposite it offering burgers, pizza, pretzels, mixed fruit, and the like. There are also various fast-food places within walking distance, though when I tried the Arby’s on Sunday, I was disappointed to find that they didn’t offer my favorite turkey and Swiss sandwich anymore.

At first, I kept my mask on, but I finally got up the nerve to take it off, at least for panels and often for hanging around with other writers. I’m freshly vaccinated, the hotel seems reasonably well-ventilated, and while there does seem to be a relative increase in COVID rates this month, they’re still pretty low nationwide, and the death rate is virtually zero. So it seems my odds of coming down with COVID aren’t that high, and if I do get infected, my vaccination will probably ease any symptoms. So I decided to take the chance. I went back and forth between masked and unmasked, trying to limit my exposure, but I kept the mask off more than I thought I would, particularly in the vendor’s room where it got very sweaty to wear. I hope I didn’t take too great a risk.

My first day, I only had a couple of panels, one talking about science fiction for young readers (a chance to tout my Tangent Knights audiobook trilogy, age 13-up) and one talking about The Marvels, which also unexpectedly gave me a chance to talk about Tangent Knights, because I was probably unconsciously influenced by Kamala Khan’s superhero-fangirl-turned-actual-superhero personality when I wrote Cory Kagami in TK. I spent some time getting acquainted with the new, spacious dealers’ room, and at 10 PM we had the regular Meet the Pros group signing event for the author guests. I only sold four books, but it went the usual way, where the final 30-45 minutes of the 2-hour event is the authors chatting with each other because the guests have already been and gone. The new room, where our tables were arranged in two concentric rectangles with an aisle between them, made it easier for us to mingle than the old long hallway. (Someone suggested shortening the event to maybe an hour and a half, and I could get behind that.)

Saturday, I didn’t have a panel until 8 PM, so I spent much of the day in my room or mingling more in the dealers’ room. I had a talk with eSpec Books’ cover artist Mike McPhail about the cover in progress for Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories. It’s taking so long because he had to acquire and learn new software for the specialized work of creating a 3D model for the Biauru. I really appreciate the extra effort he’s going to for this, though it’s a shame we didn’t have the book ready to debut at the con. Oh, and he also plans to revisit his digital model of Arachne’s avatar for the upcoming Arachne’s Legacy cover, and for future editions of the first two Arachne novels. With my input, he wants to create a model that’s more detailed and more accurate to the text.

At 4 PM, I did a signing stint at the table for Aaron’s Books, our new book vendor for the convention, but there weren’t many conventiongoers around at that point, so I only sold one book, and that was to a neighboring author who wanted to learn more about writing hard science fiction. I arranged another session for 2:30 Sunday, but if anything it was even more dead then. Next year I’ll have to sign up for an earlier session or two.

At 6 PM Saturday, a couple of groups of writers went out to try new dining places in the vicinity. Since I was a fan of our annual visits to Andy Nelson’s BBQ in Hunt Valley, I went with the group trying out a local BBQ place. Since we were a large group, there was a long wait for our order, so we went outside to wait at the outdoor picnic tables by the roadside.

What happened next was rather disturbing. I only caught a glimpse of it, mercifully, but two vehicles on the road collided right by the entrance to the parking lot. The crash sounded nothing like the usual TV/movie sound effects, more of a loud pop, so it took a few moments to realize what had happened. I don’t want to go into details that are probably private and that I’d probably get wrong, but there were serious injuries sustained.

I was shocked and dumbstruck, and on the farthest edge of the group from the collision site, but my fellow writers and friends leapt heroically into action, rushing over to see if they could help. I watched in admiration as various members of the party called 911, tended to the injured, asked if anyone nearby had medical skills, directed traffic around the accident site to clear the route for emergency vehicles, cleared the road of debris, comforted a traumatized eyewitness, and advised emergency personnel and made statements to the police when they arrived. I initially wanted to honor them by name in this post, but after talking about it with one of them, I figure it’s not my place to identify them. I was on the outskirts and remained there out of squeamishness, so my account would be unreliable. I’d probably omit some people too, which wouldn’t be fair. So I’ll just say that I was really impressed by how my friends stepped up, and I feel proud to know them. I’d like to think I would’ve taken action to help if I’d been closer or if there hadn’t been so many others there, but I’m glad I didn’t have to, since they did better than I probably could have.

It’s a lucky thing that the wait for being seated indoors was so long that we decided to do takeout and wait for it at the picnic tables. The restaurant is a fair distance back from the road, so if there hadn’t been a group of 15-16 smart people with a range of skills and experience happening to sit right there near the roadside, help would’ve been slower in coming.

Later that evening, I heard someone offer the opinion that we’d been there for a reason, that fate had arranged things to put us there at that moment. I don’t believe in that kind of destiny — what does that say about all the accident victims that didn’t get helped by nearby strangers? Why didn’t the hand of fate just prevent the accident in the first place, which would’ve been far simpler than arranging the convoluted chain of coincidence that put us there? I don’t think the universe has a pre-existing meaning or purpose in mind for us; I think that we create meaning through our choices and our actions. We are the consciousness of the universe, the part of it capable of having a will and making choices, and that gives us a supreme responsibility to the world and the people around us. My friends and colleagues fulfilled that responsibility admirably. They were in the right place at the right time by sheer chance; what gave the event meaning was the way they used that opportunity to make a positive difference.

It was surprising how quickly our mood got almost back to normal once the injured had been taken to the hospital and we collected our dinner from inside. Perhaps we were relieved that the accident hadn’t been worse. I wasn’t sure I’d have an appetite, but I do tend to stress-eat, so I managed just fine. (They didn’t have an equivalent of my usual pulled turkey BBQ, so I tried a black bean quinoa veggie burger that was pretty good. Although I had to ask a friend what quinoa was, and got corrected on the pronunciation.) The conversations at dinner were a mix of talk about the accident and talk about other things. Those of us who had 8 PM panels had resigned ourselves to missing them, since the crash site was blocking the exit from the parking lot. But as it turned out, they cleared the exit in time for us to get back only some 20 minutes late. (On the way in from the hotel parking lot, we passed a group of at least four cats, two of whom were mating rather loudly right out in the open. It certainly wasn’t a boring evening.)

Ironically, my 8 PM panel was about writing action scenes, so I had a fresh perspective to bring to that. Mike McPhail moderated that panel, and it turned out that he’d been the only panelist there until I arrived, so it’s a good thing I didn’t miss it entirely. Afterward, I found a group of writers in the lobby, where those who’d helped out after the collision related the story to those who hadn’t been there, and to those like me who only knew part of it. We then moved on to discuss other things like our new books. I sat with them, mostly listening, until past 10, since I needed time to let my big dinner settle before going to bed.

Fortunately, the rest of the trip was less eventful. I finally managed to get some sleep Saturday night, and I fended for myself for breakfast, since apparently the traditional Sunday morning authors’ breakfast wasn’t arranged this year. (I’ve skipped it the past several years anyway due to the cost, but now that I’m no longer broke, I would’ve gone this year if they’d held it.) The checkout time at this hotel is 11 instead of noon, so I had to get my stuff out to my car earlier and then just keep one bag with me, as usual. I’ve decided that for next year I should by a second, smaller rolling case, which should make things a little easier than carrying my usual five items: one suitcase for my clothes and pillow; my backpack for my laptop, water bottle, and various stuff; an insulated shopping bag with perishables and ice; a bag of books to try to sell; and my Shore Leave tote bag for the rest.

Then I hung around chatting in the dealers’ room for a bit, then tried checking out a panel one of my friends was holding. It was in a gigantic ballroom despite there only being one presenter and under ten people in the audience, which suggests to me that this hotel doesn’t have as many small meeting rooms as the old one. The ballroom’s ceiling light fixtures were lovely swirly glass tube sculptures, but the wall light fixtures were blindingly bright.

At 1 PM, I attended a panel where the eSpec Books authors and our editor/publisher Danielle Ackley-McPhail talked about our upcoming books, but we ran out of time and I barely got to talk about Aleyara’s Descent, and not at all about Arachne’s Legacy. After that came my fruitless signing session at 2:30 (though I did have a nice chat with the author sitting at the next table). Afterward, I finally got up the nerve to go over and introduce myself to David Gerrold, who’s never been at a Shore Leave I’ve attended before, and tell him how his novel The Galactic Whirlpool had always been my favorite of Bantam’s Star Trek novels, and how his The World of Star Trek and The Trouble with Tribbles (the nonfiction book about the making of the episode) helped spark my interest in the creative process and may have influenced my choice to become a writer.

So then I hit the road, and I drove very carefully at first, both because of the accident being fresh in my mind and because I remembered my tire blowing out on the Sunday after Shore Leave a couple of years ago. The car had been sitting in a hot parking lot for hours and now I was driving on a hot day, and I didn’t want to drive too fast and risk overheating the tires. But the tires held up fine, and my timing worked out well; once the setting sun was on the verge of shining into my eyes, I reached the same motel I’d stayed at Thursday night (and the previous year), which I decided to stay at again rather than gamble on an unknown commodity. It was a bit pricier than another option I had, but I could afford the peace of mind. This time, it was less busy, so I could get a room on the ground floor, a shorter trip from my car.

I got some sleep Sunday night, but not enough, so I needed a lot of caffeine and sugar to stay alert for the drive home, and there were moments when my alertness lapsed. (At one point, I drove right over a piece of tread from a blown tire almost before I realized it was there. I’m lucky it wasn’t something bigger.) I promised myself to drive carefully after the accident, but it’s hard to stay focused on such a long drive. It didn’t help that there are no rest areas along I-70 in Pennsylvania between the Turnpike and West Virginia, and the first two rest stops on westbound I-70 in Ohio were both closed for rebuilding, which strikes me as very poor planning. I’d bought a sandwich at a Turnpike travel plaza and was saving it to eat at a rest stop come lunchtime, but I ended up having to pull off the highway and eat in the parking lot of a gas station/minimart. It may not have been appropriate to eat food bought somewhere else on the minimart’s property, but I didn’t have much option. Later on, once I was on the final leg taking I-71 from Columbus to Cincinnati, I planned to stop at the rest area at mile 67, which was about halfway between my previous stop and home, but it turned out to be closed too, leaving only the stop at mile 33. I was tempted to just barrel through and drive all the way home, but I realized I needed the rest, so I made one last stop before home. I do appreciate that these rest areas are being rebuilt to be bigger and more modern, but it’s still an inconvenience that so many are closed at once. And it’s frustrating, because I made a point of looking up and writing down the locations of all the rest stops along my route so I could plan ahead, but most of the closures weren’t reported on the official websites I checked, so much of my careful planning was for naught.

There were a couple of times when my phone popped out of its cheap mount, but fortunately I didn’t really need GPS on this familiar route, except for keeping track of speed limits and traffic issues. Still, a new, better phone mount is another thing I’ve decided to buy.

So here I am home again. I went to bed early Monday night, and though I was still sleepy Tuesday morning, I decided I wanted to take a walk to the grocery store to pick up some necessities. Exercise is good for the immune system, after all, and I’m still hoping I avoid coming down with anything after the con. (There were moments when I was concerned about my throat feeling scratchy, but I realized it was from the dry air in the hotel.) Since then, I’ve been catching up on streaming shows and goofing off, though I also got around to unpacking, and I just finished giving my robot vacuum a session to make up for being turned off over the weekend. (Recently I tried to make sort of a ramp of duct tape along the edge of the carpet to help the vacuum get over it, which only made things worse, but since removing the duct tape, I’ve found that the vacuum has regained the ability to surmount the edge. My best guess is that some residual adhesive from the duct tape is holding down some of the carpet piles against the metal lip so that they don’t register as an obstruction to the vacuum. So it worked, just not the way I imagined. And it may not last.)

Overall, then, our first Shore Leave at our new location was a success. The accident nearby was unfortunate, but it’s a good thing we were there to help. I gather the convention has a 2-year contract with the hotel, so I presume I’ll be back in Lancaster next year, and then we’ll see if the contract is renewed. I could get used to the new hotel, and the moderately easier drive. The Wyndham has its quirks, but no more so than the Hunt Valley Inn did.

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 3

The third season of the BBC’s essentially complete series of productions of William Shakespeare’s plays ran from 1980-81. Jonathan Miller took over from Cedric Messina as producer, revamping the series’s approach considerably. According to Wikipedia, while Messina took a basic, prosaic approach stressing naturalistic sets and accuracy to the periods in which the plays were set, Miller took things in a more theatrical, experimental direction informed more by the aesthetics of Shakespeare’s own era, using Renaissance art as his design inspiration.

The Taming of the Shrew

The season premiere departs from the previous productions in another way. While the first two seasons relied on veteran Shakespearean stage actors, The Taming of the Shrew features a number of cast members whose filmographies are heavy on TV and film comedies. Most notably, the production made the controversial choice to cast Monty Python’s John Cleese as Petruchio, his first Shakespearean role. Cleese is well-suited for Petruchio, a character who’s sometimes calculating and thoughtful, sometimes obnoxious and boorish, sometimes mocking and silly. I can’t say I was as impressed by the rest of the cast’s attempts at comedy, adding bits of performance business that are sometimes more annoying than amusing. (The production pronounces “Petruchio” with a “ch” sound, instead of the “Pe-true-key-oh” I’m used to hearing; their version is probably more authentic to the Italian name it’s derived from, Petruccio.)

This production is light on familiar faces for me. The main one is John Franklyn-Robbins (Baptista), who was the Time Lord who sent the Fourth Doctor to Skaro in Doctor Who‘s classic “Genesis of the Daleks,” and later was Macias in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Pre-emptive Strike.” Susan Penhaligon (Bianca) was Lakis in Doctor Who: “The Time Monster.”

This is a troubling story to modern eyes, a tale of its male hero essentially gaslighting and psychologically abusing a rebellious woman into accepting a meek, submissive role as an obedient wife, in keeping with the cultural norms of the era. My Riverside Shakespeare‘s introductory essay to the play points out that the normal remedy for a “shrewish” wife in Elizabethan comedy was physical violence, so Petruchio’s methods of “taming” Katherine through mind games and manipulation was relatively benevolent — although his tactic of punishing her defiance by depriving her of food, sleep, and adequate clothing until she submits to his authority would certainly be defined today as torture and brainwashing. On top of which, Petruchio’s interest in marrying Kate is blatantly a business transaction to him, a way to improve his financial fortunes through the dowry her wealthy father Baptista provides. Moreover, Kate explicitly does not consent to the marriage, despite Petruchio claiming to her father that she does.

Meanwhile, there’s a rather nonsensical, overcomplicated B-plot in which the young Lucentio and the older Hortensio, both seeking to woo Baptista’s younger, sweeter daughter Bianca (whom he forbids to marry before Katherine does), impersonate her tutors in order to woo her behind Baptista’s back, even while Lucentio has his servant Tranio pose as himself and pretend to woo Bianca. For no clear reason, they keep up the pretense well after Kate is married and the reason for it is negated, extending it to convincing a random passerby to impersonate Lucentio’s father, then denounce his real father as an impostor when he shows up. Huh? (The fact that the daughters have tutors implies that they’re still teenagers, making the whole thing even creepier, even though both are played here by actresses in their 30s.)

As an added complication, which this production omits, the story of Petruchio and Kate is actually a play within the play. There’s an opening “Induction” in which a nobleman plays a prank on a passed-out drunk called Christopher Sly, convincing him he’s a wealthy amnesiac nobleman and bringing in a theater troupe to perform the main body of the play for him. The quarto version has an epilogue wrapping up the frame story, but the First Folio omits it. It’s suggested by some critics that making the tale a fiction within the fiction, described to Sly as a “history,” was meant to put some distance between it and the gender attitudes it depicts, since even in its own time, standards were changing and such attitudes were controversial. Indeed, John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as the King’s Men’s house playwright and his collaborator on some of his last plays, wrote a sequel in which Petruchio got his comeuppance and was “tamed” by his second wife after Katherine died. Some argue that Taming is itself meant as a satire, showing the husbands’ grotesque treatment of their wives in order to critique it. At the very least, according to my Riverside, some productions approach Kate as wanting to be “tamed,” falling for Petruchio at first sight and glad that he’s able to stand up to her.

Unfortunately, this production under Jonathan Miller’s direction does none of those things. Katherine (Sarah Badel) is portrayed as almost insane with rage and bitterness, implicitly due to being unmarried. In the early scene where Bianca pleads with Kate to “untie my hands” — clearly a metaphor, asking her sister to marry so that Bianca will no longer be restrained from seeking a husband — this production bizarrely interprets it literally, with Kate actually tying Bianca’s wrists together and dragging her around by the rope, so that our first introduction to the supposedly sweeter, gentler Bianca has her in a screaming match with her sister, undermining any sense of contrast.

Petruchio is portrayed here as showing Kate the folly of her behavior by acting even worse in response to her, showing her what it looks like from the outside so she can see how badly she’s behaving. Although there’s no indication in Badel’s performance that Kate has any desire to go through with the marriage, and there isn’t much chemistry between her and Cleese. Even in the key scene where he persuades her to play along and say the Sun is actually the Moon (or vice-versa — it’s hard to tell, the way the scene is lit), she seems to be giving in mockingly, worn down to the point that she just has to laugh and embrace the absurdity of the situation. Yet in the final scene, she’s played as perfectly content in her submission and sincere in her soft-spoken soliloquy extoling the virtues of womanly obedience. It’s an unconvincing interpretation and one rather lacking in nuance, taking the play’s gender politics at face value — possibly more so than Shakespeare himself intended, according to the critics I mentioned above. It’s rather disappointing and disquieting. Aside from Cleese’s standout performance, this was not a very enjoyable start to Miller’s tenure as producer (though it was the fourth one recorded for this season).

The Merchant of Venice

Oh, boy, now we get another problematical one, as we jump from rampant misogyny to rampant anti-Semitism. Not to worry, though. There were protests from the Anti-Defamation League about airing this episode in the US, but producer Jonathan Miller, director Jack Gold, and Shylock’s portrayer Warren Mitchell were all Jewish, and Shylock’s daughter Jessica was played by Israeli actress and human-rights advocate Leslee Udwin. They certainly handled the issues in this play better than Taming‘s all-male crew handled its gender issues.

This production is staged on the most impressionistic, minimalist sets they’ve used yet, with fully abstract backdrops, so it never feels like anything other than a stage play. The titular merchant is Antonio (John Franklyn-Robbins again), who’s so wealthy that he doesn’t mind bankrolling the profligate lifestyle of his friend Bassanio (John Nettles), who’s already deep in his debt but pleads with him to throw more good money after bad so he can woo Portia (Gemma Jones, Harry Potter‘s Madam Pomfrey), a wealthy heiress pursued by many suitors, but promised by her late father to the one who can solve the riddle of choosing between caskets of gold, silver, and lead, on pain of never marrying anyone if they should fail. Bassanio, whom Portia prefers, passes the test after two less desirable suitors fail (it’s obviously the lead one, duh), winning her hand. But since Antonio’s fortunes were all invested abroad, he took out a loan from the moneylender Shylock (Mitchell), whose practice of charging interest was seen in those days as villainous usury, in contrast to Antonio’s Christian charity relying only on faith in the borrower (which turned out pretty badly in Bassanio’s case, as the play acknowledges). Shylock, bitter at Antonio’s frequent anti-Semitic attacks on him, demands a pound of Antonio’s flesh as the penalty for defaulting on the loan. When Antonio’s trading ships are believed lost, leaving him broke, Shylock demands the contract be honored, which will kill Antonio. But Portia, on learning of the case, impersonates a male jurist named Balthazar, and after failing to convince Shylock that “The quality of mercy is not strain’d” (i.e. constrained, coerced) but given freely, she finds a loophole to get Antonio off, whereupon Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity. The final act revolves around a mean trick Portia plays on Bassanio, demanding her ring from him in Balthazar’s persona and then pretending to get mad at him for giving it up, before revealing that Antonio’s ships survived after all.

This is another one that I know I’ve seen before, since I wrote an essay about it for my college Shakespeare course in 1990. Most of it stands up well enough that I can quote it here:

“Of all the characters of William Shakespeare, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice has probably been subject to the greatest range of interpretations. There has been much disagreement over whether to portray him as ‘the devil incarnate’ (to quote The Riverside Shakespeare), a comic villain, or a noble, tragic figure. Certainly in Shakespeare’s time, when Jews were actually forbidden to live in England, the audience would have seen the Semitic usurer as a figure of evil. However, Shakespeare does not paint the character as a villainous Jew. Whatever villainy Shylock may possess lies not in his religion, but in his dogged pursuit of the infamous pound of flesh, and perhaps in his practice of usury. But… his desire to make a lasting impression on Antonio can be seen as a victim striking back against an oppressor.

“…Warren Mitchell’s performance in the BBC production portrays the character in a very positive light. His Shylock is a seemingly kindly, humorous man with a thick, appealing Jewish accent reminiscent of a character in a Mel Brooks movie. He is capable of strong, genuine emotions, including humor and grief. He attracts our sympathy…

“The play has many facets, which could almost be treated as plays in their own right. In one of these subplays, Shylock is indeed a tragic hero… The tragic flaw of Shylock is his obsession with revenge. Of course, anger against an oppressor is understandable, but Shylock’s failing is in the way he handles that anger — by turning it into an implacable lust for blood revenge which is ultimately self-destructive… In the BBC production, Shylock’s defeat is not the end of the play; but at the end of his tale, the focus is on him, and it is impossible not to sympathize with his plight. The scene is the climax of the tragedy of Shylock.”

Watching it again, I think I overstated the kindliness of Mitchell’s performance, but it’s certainly a bravura turn, making Shylock a richly faceted character whose resentment is relatable and sympathetic. When the “heroes” of the play insult his faith and mock him, Mitchell just nods and smiles with the indulgent patience of someone who’s learned over a lifetime of abuse to let it roll off him. When he’s made to convert at the end, it’s played as a deeply tragic moment as Shylock is forced to kiss a cross, an event not depicted in the text of the play. It’s easier for a modern viewer to identify with him than with the Venetians who openly mock him for his faith and call him a devil, even though the text portrays them as otherwise benevolent and admirable figures. As is usually the case (and as the BBC Shakespeare crew forgot when they made Taming), the Bard doesn’t clearly take one side or the other, but finds a basis for sympathy in characters on both sides of the conflict, showing the nobility in his villains and the folly in his heroes.

Not that the play doesn’t have other unexamined prejudices on display. One of Portia’s suitors is the Prince of Morocco, who begs her “Mislike me not for my complexion” as literally his first line. She says it’s not an issue, but after he loses the challenge, she says “Let all of his complexion choose me so” — ooh, not cool! The BBC production doesn’t improve on this any. It casts the India-born but fairly light-skinned Marc Zuber (born Zubair Ahmed Siddiqi) as the prince, but surrounds him with non-speaking black extras as his servants, including a young boy who stands there looking confused and put upon while Zuber points at him as an example of “one unworthier” than himself. Oh, come on.

Portia has always been one of my favorite Shakespeare characters (though being reminded of her racial attitudes undermines that), but I have mixed feelings about Gemma Jones’s performance. She’s fairly strong and effective, but I admit I can’t see her as the irresistible beauty the text asserts her to be, though I know how shallow that sounds. I will grant that she’s the first actress in this series who’s remotely credible at impersonating a man, thanks to her rich alto voice and the way she hardens it as Balthazar, as well as the hair-concealing headpiece she wears.

Portia’s maid and co-conspirator Nerissa is Susan Jameson, who guest starred in Gerry Anderson’s UFO and Space: 1999. The Duke of Venice in the courtroom scene is Douglas Wilmer, who appeared in Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and played Sherlock Holmes in a 1960s BBC series and in Gene Wilder’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. The great John Rhys-Davies, who had a bit part in Henry VIII as a messenger, plays a more prominent supporting role as Antonio’s friend Salerio (whose name changes from Salarino to Salerio midway through the original text, though modern scholars presume they’re the same character). His companion Solanio (the Guildenstern to his Rosenkrantz, or vice versa) is Alan David, who would be in Doctor Who: “The Unquiet Dead.” They’re the two to whom Shylock delivers the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, and the production shows them laughing dismissively as Mitchell delivers it in a similarly jocular tone, until he hardens it with “Shall we not revenge?” An unexpected choice, but it makes for a potent climax.

The controversial elements aside, I found this a much more successful comedic production than Taming was. The humor in the play is strong, and the cast delivers it well. I give particular props to Enn Reitel, a Scottish actor with plenty of voice-acting credits including Spitting Image, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and Phineas and Ferb. He plays the clown Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant who defects to Bassanio, and uses his vocal skills very well in his opening soliloquy about the angel and devil on his shoulders urging him in different directions.

All’s Well That Ends Well

This is another of Shakespeare’s comedies revolving around impersonations and bedroom swaps, though there’s no cross-dressing in this one. When Helena (Angela Down), the common-born ward of the Countess of Roussillon (Dame Celia Johnson), uses her late father’s unequaled medical knowledge to cure the dying king of France (Donald Sinden, whom I mentioned in my comments on Twelfth Night), the reward she demands is the hand of the Countess’s son, Bertram (Chariots of Fire‘s Ian Charleson, who was Fortinbras in season 2’s Hamlet), whom she loves but who disdains her as a commoner, even after the King awards her a title. Forced into marriage against his will, Bertram flees to the wars in Italy rather than share her bed, leaving her a letter saying he’ll only call her his wife if she gives him the heirloom ring he never takes off and is pregnant with his child. She goes after him in the guise of a pilgrim, feigning her death along the way, and when Bertram tries to seduce a local woman named Diana (Pippa Guard, who was Miranda in The Tempest last season), Helena arranges with her to take her place in bed so Bertram will unknowingly consummate his vows with her, allowing her to claim him as her husband in the final scene. (Did people never make love with the lights on back then?)

It’s hard to know who to root for in this. We’re supposed to sympathize with Helena, an undoubtedly worthy woman despite the technicality of her common birth, and Bertram is an undeniable cad for looking down on her, cheating on her, lying to the king about it in the final act, etc. On the other hand, she (with the king’s cooperation) literally forces him to marry her against his will, then tricks him into having sex with her without his knowledge, which is rape by fraud. Neither one of them comes out of it looking that good, and by the end, it’s incomprehensible why we’re supposed to believe Bertram turns on a dime at the end and accepts Helena as his wife and love, or why Helena would even want him to after seeing what a horrible person he is. This is the most tacked-on happy ending yet, of the ones I’ve seen so far in this series.

On top of that, nobody seems to have told director Elijah Moshinsky that this was a comedy. Not only does he go for a visual style inspired by chiaroscuro paintings and silhouettes, which makes many of the scenes murky, gloomy, and oppressive if you can even see what’s going on, but nearly everyone plays their scenes with ponderous solemnity. It feels more like a funeral than a comedy. Angela Down is fairly good at playing Helena’s serious side, but there’s no sense of her purported love for Bertram, and Ian Charleson is so bland and unappealing as Bertram that there’s no indication of why she’d fall for him in the first place. Even more bizarrely, the scene where Helena asks the king to give her the husband of her choice if she cures him is played like a love scene, with Sinden’s king stroking Helena’s face intimately and kissing her at the end, implying they’re about to sleep together, which is badly incongruous considering how much of the play is about defending marital fidelity and honor and all that. (Apparently this was Sinden’s idea, but the director could’ve said no.) All around, this is perhaps the most unpleasant adaptation yet in this series.

There are a number of familiar faces here. Our old friend Michael Hordern (Lord Capulet, Prospero) is back as Lafeu, a confidante of the Countess and member of the royal court. Peter Jeffrey, who was the villain Count Grendel in Doctor Who: “The Androids of Tara,” is the play’s comic villain Parolles, whose subplot — where Bertram’s other friends help him see what a lying scoundrel Parolles is and reduce him from a nobleman to a beggar — is a counterpoint to Helena’s; just as a common woman is proven to have noble virtues, so a dandified nobleman turns out to be a dishonorable knave, fitting the theme of judging people by their actions rather than their words or appearances. Jeffrey is just about the only cast member who seems to know he’s in a comedy. Even the play’s obligatory fool/clown character, Lavache (Paul Brooke, the weepy Rancor Keeper in Return of the Jedi), is played in a surly deadpan.

A couple of other major Doctor Who villains have bit parts here. The Countess’s Steward, Rinaldo, is Kevin Stoney (returning from Measure for Measure), who was Mavic Chen in “The Daleks’ Masterplan” and Tobias Vaughn in “The Invasion.” The astringer (goshawk keeper) who delivers Diana’s letter to the king in the final act is the Black Guardian himself, Valentine Dyall. Outside of DW, Donald Sinden was the Colonel in The Prisoner‘s “Many Happy Returns.” A soldier (I think it’s the one who plays the interpreter when Bertram’s men make Parolles think he’s been abducted by the enemy) is played by Nickolas Grace, who was the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin of Sherwood and Albert Einstein in a 2011 Doctor Who mini-episode.

The Winter’s Tale

Elementary! We’ve got both a Holmes and a Watson here, though not a matched pair. King Polixenes is played by Robert Stephens, who played the Great Detective in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. His ally Camillo, appropriately, is David Burke, who was Dr. Watson in the first season of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series, before Edward Hardwicke replaced him for the remainder of its run.

We’ve also got two actors returning from Henry VIII, both with notable genre roles: Jeremy Kemp (Captain Picard’s brother) and John Bailey, who was in three different Doctor Who roles including the father of the Doctor’s companion Victoria. The cast also includes Margaret Tyzack, who was Indy’s tutor in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; Colin McCormack, the Commander in Doctor Who: “The Sunmakers;” and Arthur Hewlett, who was in DW: “State of Decay” and “Terror of the Vervoids.” But the most prolific Whovian guest star here is Pat Gorman, who was a background player or suit actor in over a hundred episodes of the classic series. He plays the Bear (as in “Exit, pursued by a…,” the most infamous stage direction in Shakespeare). Meanwhile, the music is by classic Doctor Who‘s most prolific composer, Dudley Simpson.

This is one I know I read back in college, but I don’t remember much about it. The title The Winter’s Tale denoted an old wives’ tale, a fanciful story not meant to be taken literally, and the play reflects that. It’s set in a timeless era where the characters worship the classical gods and visit the Oracle at Delphi, yet modern nations like Russia exist, and Bohemia (a landlocked region) has a sea coast. The first half is a tragic tale in which King Leontes of Sicilia (Kemp), overcome with paranoid jealousy of the innocent friendship between his pregnant wife Hermione (Anna Calder-Marshall) and his childhood friend King Polixenes of Bohemia (Stephens), orders his nobleman Camillo (Burke) to poison Polixenes. When Camillo instead warns Polixenes and flees with him, Leontes tries Hermione for crimes that exist only in his delusions, sentencing her to prison, where she gives birth. Leontes assumes wrongly that the baby girl is Polixenes’s bastard, ordering Antigonus (Cyril Luckham) to take the baby to Bohemia and abandon it there. Leontes disbelieves even the Delphic Oracle’s declaration (surprisingly direct and unambiguous for a Delphic utterance) that Hermione is innocent, but when he learns that their preadolescent son has died from grief, Leontes is shocked back to sanity, and Hermione swoons; Antigonus’s wife Paulina (Tyzack) reports that Hermione died offstage. Leontes dedicates himself to repentance for his sins.

In Bohemia, Antigonus leaves the baby as ordered, naming her Perdita (“Lost”), and is promptly devoured by the infamous bear, while his ship is wrecked in a storm, so there’s nobody left to tell the tale. The baby is found by an illiterate shepherd (Hewlett) who can’t read the documents explaining the daughter’s origins, so he assumes she’s a changeling and adopts her as his daughter. (Yet somehow he’s aware her name is Perdita.)

The second half of the play is more of a pastoral comedy. We fast-forward 16 years, where Perdita (Debbie Farrington) is being wooed by King Polixenes’s son Florizel (Robin Kermode), who has no idea she’s royal-born. Neither does Polixenes, and he and Camillo don disguises to spy on Florizel at a sheep-shearing festival, whereupon Polixenes denounces his son for marrying below his class and condemns the shepherd to hang. Camillo intervenes again and persuades them to flee to Sicilia (not selfless, since he wants an excuse to go back there), while the shepherd and his son are prompted to follow by the comic-relief pickpocket and con artist, Autolycus (Rikki Fulton). (No doubt named for the master thief Autolycus from Greek mythology, the basis for Bruce Campbell’s Autolycus in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, though now I have to wonder if Campbell’s comic rogue was based just as much on his Shakespearean namesake.) Leontes, eager to repent for his wrongs against Polixenes, welcomes his son and his bride, until he learns that Polixenes has followed and the girl is exposed as a peasant.

Oddly, the moment where the shepherd shows everyone the documents revealing Perdita’s true identity and everyone is reconciled happens offstage and is described after the fact by some random gentleman to some other random gentlemen and Autolycus, something that happens strangely often in Shakespeare. The climax has Paulina show everyone an incredibly lifelike statue of Hermione, which she then reveals to be the actual Hermione, who apparently faked her death and has been in hiding for 16 years while waiting for the Oracle’s prediction of the child’s return to come true, or something — it’s really not very well-explained at all.

Director Jane Howell staged this one on a single stylized set that was redressed to represent every location, so that some scenes that should be indoors are implausibly outdoors, and others just have black backgrounds in place of walls. It’s a stylization that fits with the unreality of the story, but I can’t say I’m crazy about it. A bigger issue is that Jeremy Kemp delivers many of Leontes’s lines so softly that they’re barely audible, though this is hardly the first time in this series that the actors have been inadequately miked — part of the reason I always watch with the subtitles on. Otherwise, in terms of casting and performance, it’s reasonably well-done. It doesn’t have the strange mismatch of tone and subject that All’s Well had; the performances are intense and dramatic when they’re supposed to be, comedic when they’re supposed to be. None of the performances really stand out for me, but Tyzack is strong and commanding as Paulina, and Fulton is pretty entertaining as Autolycus. All the actors deliver their soliloquies directly to the camera, which seems like part of Leontes’s paranoid delusions when he does it, but often feels more comical in the second half. There’s a fun moment where Camillo is confiding his plans to the audience in an aside, and Autolycus comes up behind him and looks curiously at us over Camillo’s shoulder, participating in the fourth-wall break.

Timon of Athens

This one’s new to me. It’s one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, believed to be co-authored by Thomas Middleton. My Riverside says it was only published in the First Folio because a copyright problem forced them to replace Troilus and Cressida at the last minute (I didn’t realize they had copyrights back then), and that the version we have is a rough, possibly unfinished draft. It’s based on a legendary figure from the era of the Peloponnesian War, one that Shakespeare probably learned about while researching Antony and Cleopatra, since Plutarch’s Lives compares Marcus Antonius to Timon.

Jonathan Pryce (Brazil, Pirates of the Caribbean, 3 Body Problem) plays Timon, an Athenian general and nobleman who, like Antonio from The Merchant of Venice, is generous to a fault, freely throwing lavish parties and giving loans and gifts to his friends, even refusing offers to pay him back, since he basks in his friends’ flattery of his goodness and nobility. Ignoring the advice of his loyal steward Flavius (John Welsh), he bankrupts himself with his profligacy, and when he asks his friends to repay his generosity, they abandon him and he realizes they were only using him, as he’d been warned by Apemantus (Norman Rodway), a misanthropic philosopher. Timon becomes a hermit in the wilderness, embracing misanthropy with an excess that Apemantus looks on with scorn, seeing Timon as a man who raced from one toxic extreme to its opposite. Improbably, Timon happens upon some buried gold, and when word gets out, everyone seeks him out again, and he gives the gold away as freely as before, just more rudely and disdainfully, which doesn’t exactly keep anyone away.

There’s an underdeveloped subplot based on the exile of the Athenian general Alcibiades. In this version, Alcibiades (John Shrapnel, heck of a name for a guy playing a warrior) protests when the senate sentences one of his soldiers to execution, is exiled for it, and raises an army to attack Athens. The invasion unfolds offscreen while Timon wallows in his hermit hole, visited at one point by Alcibiades (whom he invites to slaughter the Athenians and defile their women) and then by Athenians begging him to lead their defense (which he agrees to do provided they hang themselves first). The final scene shows the Athenian senators surrendering and basically agreeing to let Alcibiades kill everyone who wronged him as long as he leaves the rest alone, whereupon they learn that Timon has died and left a misanthropic epitaph (actually two different epitaphs copied from different sources, one of which was probably supposed to have been edited out later).

I understand why this is not one of the Bard’s better-known plays, since it’s a minor effort. Timon is not a particularly appealing or even interesting character; he’s just a shallow guy who carelessly gives his wealth away and overreacts when he learns his friends were only interested in his money, and then wallows in self-pity and avoidable suffering until he randomly dies. It’s hard to empathize with his self-inflicted tragedy, especially when he’s literally sitting on top of a pile of buried gold yet acting like he’s still the most miserable beggar alive. Apemantus (whose name means “feeling no pain”) is a more entertaining character, talking a good game about despising humanity, but in a performative way that his colleagues see as entertainment. For all his cynicism, he’s kinder to Timon than Timon deserves, trying to help him curb his excesses both before and after his fall, yet having his advice fall on deaf ears.

Producer Jonathan Miller took over as director after Michael Bogdanov’s proposal to do the play in modern Asian dress was deemed too radical. That’s probably just as well, but Miller puts the Ancient Greek characters in equally anachronistic Elizabethan dress, and much about the production is quite strange. Timon’s banquet encompassing the first act takes over a half-hour, fully a quarter of this fairly short production, and is quite padded out, with a long sequence of people eating and enjoying themselves without dialogue, and “Cupid”‘s introduction of a performance of “Amazon” dancers being turned into a song by a whole children’s choir. However, a couple of scenes are omitted, including a long exchange between Apemantus and the play’s resident Fool, who’s entirely absent from Miller’s version.

But stranger than the pacing is the staging. Most of the scenes are shot with a single camera, or at most with infrequent cuts to a second, yet there are multiple scenes where one or more characters will retreat to or enter at the rear of the stage, far from both the camera and the microphone, so that their lines are nearly or completely inaudible. It happens so often that it must be a deliberate stylistic choice, but it’s a bizarre and irritating one. It’s also awkward that most of Timon’s exile sequence in Acts IV-V is shot continuously, with each of Timon’s encounters with different characters coming immediately on the heels of the last, even though that would require the word of Timon’s new wealth to spread to multiple different people in a matter of minutes, which isn’t enough time for them to get back to Athens and tell anyone. Plus, Jonathan Pryce spends most of the two acts just sitting in place, just happening to discover the buried gold right in front of him, then barely budging as people come and go. It’s rather boring staging that feels slapdash and rushed. There’s an attempt to do something visually interesting by having Timon’s final self-pitying speech delivered while he’s lying down so that his face is upside-down in the frame, but that just looks weird and somewhat comical.

As for Pryce’s performance, it’s okay, going from banal friendliness in the first half to bitter rage in the second, but I think an older, more experienced Pryce, or a better-directed one, might have been able to bring more nuance and substance. Rodway’s entertaining as Apemantus, keeping the character likeable despite his negativity. The rest of the cast does fine, but with no real standouts.

Aside from Jonathan Pryce and recurring Doctor Who guest John Bailey (returning from The Winter’s Tale), the guests in the opening banquet scene include two notable genre figures. The great Tony Jay, known for many voice roles such as the Supreme Being in Time Bandits, Megabyte in ReBoot, and Chairface Chippendale in The Tick, plays a merchant who gets a handful of lines; and Sebastian Shaw, Return of the Jedi‘s Anakin Skywalker, plays the Old Athenian who complains about Timon’s servant wooing his daughter until Timon offers to match the Athenian’s dowry. Shaw is our second Darth Vader portrayer in this series, after David Prowse in As You Like It.

Antony and Cleopatra

The season finale brings in our second Dr. Watson in three weeks, with Mark Antony played by Colin Blakely, who was the Watson to Robert Stephens in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. He’s a few years younger than Keith Michell, who played Antony in Julius Caesar back in season 1, and looks younger still, even though this play is set more than a decade later. It would’ve been nice if they’d done this immediately after JC, made a 2-parter out of it with recurring cast members, like they did with Richard II and the Henry plays. Instead, all three returning characters are recast. Octavius Caesar, who was played by Garrick “Biggs Darklighter” Hagon in JC, is played here by Ian Charleson (recently seen as Bertram in All’s Well, and equally dull as Octavius) and Esmond Knight (Doctor Who: “The Space Pirates”) replaces Roy Spencer as the third and least interesting Triumvir, Lepidus.

This was actually the first episode Jonathan Miller produced in recording order, and he also directed it, making it a somewhat more elaborate production than his bare-bones Timon. Blakely’s Antony has pretty good chemistry with Jane Lapotaire’s Cleopatra, with whom he’s besotted to the point of abandoning his duties (and two consecutive wives) in Athens. It’s a turbulent, somewhat unhealthy, but endearingly sincere love affair between two aging leaders (the casting approximates the historical figures’ ages, fiftyish for Antony and late thirties for Cleopatra), though I think Cleo is unflatteringly portrayed both by Shakespeare and by Miller, depicted as flighty, selfish, and unreliable, luring Antony to his ruin through his unwise infatuation with her. My Riverside says Cleo is considered Shakespeare’s most complex female character, but I don’t see it.

The play’s structure is a bit of a mess in the middle, with massive political and military reversals happening offstage between consecutive scenes — Antony reconciles with Octavius by marrying his sister (which she apparently has no say in), but in the next scene they’re at war; Antony is assembling a mighty navy, but in the next scene he’s bemoaning their total rout. It’s possible that Shakespeare’s audience knew this history by heart so that the telegraphic presentation didn’t confuse them, but it feels like a lot was skipped over. Miller’s direction doesn’t help, since he cuts instantly between these scenes without a transition, which is whiplash-inducing. At one point, he omits a couple of scenes where characters described the Battle of Actium, instead silently scrolling a description of the battle quoted from Plutarch’s Lives (Shakespeare’s very closely followed source for the play) over a famous painting of the battle. It doesn’t help much.

I do remember covering this play in my senior year of high school, and I probably got cast as Antony in the class read-through. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this production before too, since some scenes and cast members look familiar, particularly Emrys James (Doctor Who: “State of Decay,” Dragonslayer) as Antony’s general Enobarbus, the play’s main comic-relief figure. But I don’t recall my opinion of the play back then. This time around, I found it kind of weak. On the one hand, there was that confusing, rushed middle part jumping over so many big events between scenes; on the other hand, the last two acts spend way too long focusing on the lead characters talking themselves into “honorable” suicide and then following through. Granted, it’s basically what happened in real life (although Cleopatra probably died from poison, not an asp bite), but it’s still not a pleasant subject. It is interesting, though, that one of the play’s two title characters dies with one whole act still to go.

One cast member I almost didn’t recognize was Donald Sumpter as Pompey. Sumpter was in classic Doctor Who‘s “The Wheel in Space” and “The Sea Devils,” The Sarah Jane Adventures‘ “The Eternity Trap,” and the modern Who‘s “Hell Bent” as President Rassilon, and I just recently saw him in Agatha Christie’s Poirot‘s adaptation of The ABC Murders. Yet even though this was just from a decade or so earlier, Sumpter looked so much younger that I wasn’t sure it was he. Some people get old-looking quickly.

–

Overall, Jonathan Miller’s freshman season as producer and director was very uneven, with a few strong adaptations and several misfires. The unabashedly theatrical approach is a matter of taste, but the series’s recurring problem with properly miking its actors only got worse this year. I don’t feel Miller treated Shakespeare’s female characters all that well, particularly Katherine and Cleopatra, though Portia and Paulina came off fairly well, and Helena to a lesser extent.

Incidentally, it turns out that this season has even more actors than I thought who’ve played Holmes and Watson. In addition to Douglas Wilmer and Robert Stephens, Jonathan Pryce played Holmes in a TV movie, and John Cleese in a couple of comedy productions. And in addition to David Burke and Colin Blakely, John Rhys-Davies voiced Dr. Watson in Tom and Jerry Meet Sherlock Holmes. The roster also includes a couple of actors from earlier seasons; Timothy West (Cardinal Wolsey from Henry VIII) has played Watson, and Tim Pigott-Smith (Hotspur and Measure for Measure‘s Angelo) played Watson on stage in the ’70s and Holmes on radio in the ’80s.

Next up is the abbreviated fourth season, which aired six months after the third ended and featured only three plays, two of which I know well, one of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen.

Shore Leave schedule update

Well, just hours after I posted my Shore Leave panel schedule without the full descriptions, the convention site posted the full schedule:

Schedule

So now I can offer more detailed descriptions of my panels:

Fri 5:00 PM, Cornwall: Sci-Fi for Young People—Where is it?

There seems to be a dearth of science fiction for children, middle grade, and
young adults, outside of Star Wars tie-ins and SF-adjacent dystopian novels.
Jenifer Rosenberg, Mary Fan, Christine Norris, Christopher L. Bennett,
Michael Jan Friedman

Fri 6:00 PM, New Holland: The Marvels

Let’s chat about the characters of Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and
Kamala Khan in The Marvels and across the MCU and comics.
Christopher L. Bennett, Kelli Fitzpatrick , Kathleen David, Laura Ware,
Rigel Ailur

Fri 10:00 PM, Wheatland: Meet the Pros

The annual group book-signing session for all the author guests.

Sat 8:00 PM, Cornwall: Action Scenes – Fight Me!

How do you write a good action scene, and how do they differ from other
types? How do you make a battle convincing, and believable?
Alan Smale, Mike McPhail, Christopher L. Bennett, Mike Friedman,
Mariah Southworth

Sun 1:00 PM, Cornwall: eSpec Books Presents

eSpec authors share their new titles and what else is going on with eSpec,
including taking Q&A from those curious about the press.
Christopher L. Bennett, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Keith R.A. DeCandido,
Christine Norris, Hildy Silverman, Aaron Rosenberg