what will I ever do for fun?

Forty-odd masters students, scribbling pretentiously in their notebooks. Forty-odd overly analytical minds, ascribing meaning to every unintentional or accidental action on stage. Forty-odd academics-in-training, trying to squish you and your work into the theoretical categories that are their language.

I would hate us.

Luckily, the directors and writers we have chatted with are more forgiving. I don't know why. Sometimes even I cringe at the questions asked. When someone looks an author squarely in the face and says, "Why did you write this? What does it even mean?" I have to swallow hard to surpress nervous laughter and the desire to smack my classmate on the back of the head (did you not just watch it?).

Strangely, those are the questions that spark the most interesting conversations. "What do you think it means?" Paul Pourveur, author of the brilliant Shakespeare is Dead, Get Over It fired back. My same classmate, whose head I would have patted after smacking, articulated a thoughtful response about the fragmentation of modern life and our complex relationship with history. Pourveur corroborated, added an attack on universality, questioned our love affair with the past, discussed how he tried to get that across with his writing.

Voilà interesting conversation.

Other questions, which seem like they should yield fabulous insights, fall flat. How disappointing to find that the placement of the tv screens and doors on the back projection panel “just happened” (what, the screens covered Shakespeare's eyes and ears by accident? You didn't notice when that actor enters through the door that is on Brigitte Bardot's BOOB??) Or that four actors were cast (for a script that is not divided into parts) because that is what the theatre admin agreed to pay for. Or that the projections, screens, titles, and sound effects (which totally dominated the mise en scène) were incorporated just because “I wanted to try using technology on stage.”

Sometimes talking with the directors just leaves us more in the dark. As spectators we embue everything on stage with meaning, as students of performing arts, with intention. The answer to how or why questions is often “euh...intuition, “ or simply, “I don't know, it just happened.”

And then sometimes I find a director passionately defending a concept that we have looked at in class, or, what gives me more pleasure, saying something that metaphorically kicks Meyer and his irritating theory in the pants. Often they are are willing to talk about their influences, the schools of thought and practice they subscribe to, and their thoughts on contemporary theatre.

Often they make us smile:
What does the poster mean? I don't know, I found the picture on the internet and I liked it. You are looking for Shakespeare, or meaning in Shakespeare, and he's there, up your ass.
Or,
Why are the seven male actors in my version of Hamlet in their underwear? We do the most important things in life naked.

I don't ask too many questions (and when I do they are usually of the variety that fall flat) but I listen and am pleased to have the theatre as my classroom and the likes of Philippe Sireuil, Frédéric Dussenne and Jacques Delcuvellerie as teaching assistants.

I do have one reoccurring question that I have yet to find a satisfactory answer to.

If this is what I do for work now, what on earth am I supposed to do for fun?