Playception

Post date: Mar 5, 2017 5:48:46 PM

I thought I would take some inspiration from last week and use another photo in this journal post.

Unlike last week, I had an idea of what I wanted to write about and then attempted to find a meme that matched it, I thought this was pretty good. Being involved with theater for a lot of my life, I especially love reading new plays. While I have never done a Shakespeare piece besides a monologue, he is slowly becoming one of my favorite play writes. There is something so alluring about having a play within a play. With Midsummer Night's Dream being my favorite and Love's Labor's Lost being in the top five, I'm starting to see the allure of what I call playception or a play within a play.

One of the main goals of a play is for the actors, stage directions, and props to guide an audience's feelings something but never explicitly tell them how to feel. They're more so leading so that the play is still an interpretation instead of an outright essay on why this is bad or why humanity should look more into this theme. People will always pull things out of performances that actors and directors didn't even know were there once again proving that there is no right or wrong just individual interpretation.

Reading Richard III, there's never an explicit play as in other shows but still the function of what these plays accomplish remain. Depending on how you view the character of Richard, he could be a good guy pretending to be a bad guy or a bad guy who slowly becomes better especially during his act 5 scene 3 monologue. Despite which interpretation you take of him, there's this message of Richard giving a performance and we are being shown all of the contradicting points for what to make out of him. By the end of play, I still don't know how I'm supposed to feel about him.

There's also the big dream sequence that I find it important to hit on. Why show us this dream sequence and why set it up the way he does? First of all, 90% of the action in this play takes place somewhere else and then we are told about it from other characters so why are we watching this play out fully? Second, why is this scene overflowing with stage directions when there's barely any present in the play. Most of Shakespeare's work is up for interpretation but I'm pretty sure he has a pretty good idea for how he wants this scene to play out. This scene comes off the most "play-like" as there are ghosts "performing" for both Richard and Richmond. There is the separate play within the play where characters are guiding our feelings. I do not think it is as simple as Richard = bad, Richmond = good, but more so the comparisons that we are striking between them. This comparison continues into each of their orations to their soldiers where I still don't want to make out of the two of them.