The Spoons That Are My Ears!

Last night I went to see an outdoor production of Hamlet in the grounds of Oystermouth Castle. I went with Jo, my girlfriend, and half a dozen of her friends. The setting was perfect for the play but as soon as the actors started speaking I was utterly lost. I don’t really understand Shakespeare just by listening to the words. I have to read the plays carefully first and even then I rarely get the full meaning. On his own blog, the venerable Stuart Ross of Frictionless Man has been complaining about not understanding Michael Moorcock’s cult Cornelius novels. Hamlet baffled me as much as The English Assassin has baffled Mr Ross. The essential difference is that nobody I know has ever claimed to understand the Cornelius books, whereas everybody I meet seems to have no problems with Shakespeare at all. During the interval, I bumped into Dai Godwin, guitarist for The Caves, and when I confessed my lack of comprehension about the plot and characters he just shrugged and said, “Hamlet’s easy.”

The best part of the evening in my opinion was the picnic we had while waiting for the play to start. Scones with clotted cream and real strawberries, grapes, cheese, biscuits, pretzels and stuffed black olives! Banquo didn’t appear in the play because he’s from Macbeth (I learned that this morning) but there was another ghost, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and he looked and spoke exactly like Darth Vader. There were also lots of moths and a bat.

Talking about Frictionless Man, I’m delighted that they’ll be playing at my next booklaunch in September. And in fact, At the Molehills of Madness has just been published! I received a big box of free copies from the publisher yesterday. I’m very happy with the way it looks and I’m looking forward to the launch. I’m sure I’ll plug both the band and my book more in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll settle for quickly mentioning The Pomo Show. The Frictionless Man provide the background music for edition #2 and I briefly appear in edition #3. The show itself is hilarious!

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 10:22 AM