rashbre central: get thee to a nunnery

Sunday 13 November 2011

get thee to a nunnery

There's quite some logistics to moving Ophelia to the right spot. It's one of the delicate plot points in Shakespeare's great tragedy, Hamlet.

After Ophelia's father Polonius is mistakenly killed by the mad Prince of Denmark, there's the scene where Ophelia is told to go to a nunnery. Unfortunately, after a period of her own strange behaviour she is found drowned.

It's ruled as an accident, but the gravediggers have another opinion. Of course, it means carrying Ophelia's body in and then lowering it to the right spot. This takes quite some practice and the little clip shows one of the early takes from Saturday's blocking out of the action.

The second little clip is a trial blocking of Prince Hamlet talking to the Ghost of dead King Hamlet.

The whole production will be given the Steampunk treatment by Thursday and I'll be able to edit some footage instead of just uploading raw cuts from a Macbook. ...And I can't resist one of the test runs of the scene where Hamlet and Laertes argue and which leads to the duel where Claudius plots Hamlet's demise (it all kicks off around 2:05)

4 comments:

Pat said...

Has rigor mortis set in? Ophelia's arms are quite stiff. Would they not dangle?

rashbre said...

Pat - Well spotted. There were a few things about Ophelia's demise that remain a mystery.

Imaginography said...

LoL! I noticed the arms too :)

This all takes me back to my days back stage.

rashbre said...

Imaginography The greater challenge will be siphoning the water out of the trough during the interval.