Althought I’ve never done it, I would imagine that Shakespearian acting would be very difficult. It would make sence, seeing as many find the works of the bard not only hard to read, but also difficult to understand. I, personally, love reading Shakespeare. My favorite of his plays is the first one that I ever read, The Merchant of Venice. Unfortunately, it’s not very well known. I first began reading Shakespeare a few years ago for my acting class. Every year, Stage Right (a school for the prefoming arts in Greensburg) is one of the many schools that participate in the annual Pittsburgh Shakespeare Competition. It’s when a school like Stage Right takes all the dorks that want to go, myself included, to a competition where we compete by either preforming a scene with someone else fom our school that is taken from on of William’s plays or reciting shakespearian monologues at each other. At the end of the day someone is awarded as the best shakespearean actor for that year. In preperation for the competition, we ( being the kids in my acting class and I) choose a monologue months in advance so we can begin the long and painful process of memorizing the monologue and rehearsing it over and over and over in order to prefect it, all the while being critiqued by our teacher and fellow students. It’s not something that comes naturally. You have to work hard at it. So it came as a suprise to me when, while watching a clip on youtube from the royal shakespeare company of Ian McKellen alongside Sylvester McCoy in King Lear, I was informed that McKellen is completely self taught. No formal training at all. No acting classes. No teacher harping about breaking the third wall, or the method acting, or stanford meisner or any of that. And yet, there he was, standing beside McCoy tossing out shakespearian verse as if it was nothing. McKellen has starred in countless movies, some of which are actually ”remakes” of shakespeare’s timeless plays. And it makes me wonder ‘Well, if he can do it without having sat through countless hours of acting classes, then why can’t I?’ And that bothered me for a moment. But then I reminded myself that I love my acting classes because I love acting. I love it. All of it. From the warm up games, to writing about the objective of a scene about movie tickets, to preforming a monologue by William Shakespeare, arguably the best playwrite of our time. So if Ian’s raw tallent was what they wanted, and he was good enough that he didn’t need direction to give him that step ahead, good for him. But I think I’ll just keep on truckin’ along, learning to do what I love in baby steps now so that hopefully some day it will come as naturally to me as breathing.
