To see ourselves.

Having watched a Shakespearean production with the actor/comedian Lenny Henry playing the lead role I was struck by the modern urge to accentuate the story with action.
The need to accentuate and concoct with a set of moves, like those in a Musical. Flamboyant, eye catching interactivity on the stage designed to create a wow factor in the mind of the audience. Andrew Lloyd Webber's, Cats or the Phantom of the Opera use the stage and movement about the stage (in Cats they skate into the audience) to create another dimension to the lovely music and the pathos of the story told. Shakespeare is different. I think Lloyd Webber's music would stand on its own, (it certainly does in the record shop), without the stage craft, Shakespeare doesn't need a prop of any sort, other than perhaps the clothing to set the scene in the time it was written and the characters who historically existed at that point in time. The beauty of Shakespeare is the dialogue, that construct of language and the minds of the men and women who are revealed by the dialogue. To read Shakespeare is to listen, in ones own head, to the craft, the guile, the play and counter play of desire, sharpened by the genius of a word-smith the world has never seen the like. The sound, when the words are spoken by a good actor are of a musical quality, the players like instruments in an orchestra, feeding off each other with rapacious vigour, setting the human condition under the spotlight and making us all see ourselves for what we are.