ONCE UPON A TIME...
...there was a blog called King Lear & Other Stories: this is one of the other stories.
TWICE UPON A TIME...
...there was a girl. And a boy. Or a man and a woman, depending upon how grown-up you want to be.
And there was a theatre company. That year they were producing a play by William Shakespeare called 'Much Ado About Nothing'. As it turned out, the title could not have been more wrong - it was about everything.
The Girl (let's call her Lesley) came to auditions, looking to become involved in theatricals, and she became part of the Watch in Much Ado.
Here she is, second from right, in the hand-crafted costume that so obviously attracted the interest of The Boy in question...we'll get to him in minute or two... and costume and quirky style became The Girl's trademark in the next couple of productions.
The Boy (let us, for the sake of ease, call him Phil) had been in the previous year's production of The Tempest, and had given such a storming performance as The Captain (pun not intended, but we'll let it stand!) that he returned the following year to play Benedick in Much Ado.
Here he is below in a very fetching mask...and the Boy and the Girl fell to talking.
It seems that fate, kismet, karma...you choose...had a hand in their meeting. As did strange costuming and blood.
The following year, Lesley and Phil (now very much a couple) returned to the castle and took on ever more challenging roles.
Lesley, sticking with tradition, donned rags and bad teeth to play one of the Wyrd Sisters that Macbeth meets on the Heath.
And Phil, breaking with tradition, donned skirt, sword and a gallon or two of blood, to play Macbeth's doomed best-buddy, Banquo.
The Scottish Play worked its weird magic - although I get the feeling that what happened would have happened anyway! - and on the Friday night, Phil, with the help of a few friends, mainly Macbeth, and the knowledge of all, except Lesley, took the young lady to a secluded spot and there, to the dulcet tones of Macbeth singing, proposed a proposition that she could not, in all conscience, refuse.
He asked her to be his wife.
And she accepted.
The following year, they returned to play in As You Like It. There was a (largely unspoken) hope that, as the characters they were playing eventually get married (along with three other couples!), that they might do the deed for real. But they had other plans.
In 2012, they once again played characters that eventually fall in love and marry...didn't happen on stage then, either!
BUT...
...on 27th May, 2013, in Assos, on the Greek island of Kephalonia, Lesley and Phil, The Girl and The Boy, who had first met all those years before, finally got married!
And on July 27th, 2013, in Stoke Fleming, just beyond Dartmouth, they did it all again!!
It's a story that deserves sharing.
And from everybody in the company to our two lovely friends, may you have a long and happy life together...and what you doing in 2014? There are parts...
 |
| Lesley and her Sisters |
In Greece?!!?
And finally, this is from Twelfth Night, when Phil played Orsino and Lesley was Viola. Probably not the hardest bit of acting either of them ever had to do...
And the moral of all this is:
Theatre - more fun and much more effective than speed dating!!
Good luck and love to them both.
No comments:
Post a Comment