Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere

My chief problem with The Coveted Crown was that it is not immediately followed by the Actors' Shakespeare Project's Henry V with Bill Barclay in the title role, but maybe someone will think of that before next season. He was a sort of straightforwardly dissolute young prince for his first few scenes and then gathered three-dimensionality like a juggernaut as the world complicated itself around him and his sense of self with it: What wouldst thou think of me, if I should weep? The Dauphin's mocking envoy of tennis balls has a real nasty flick to it, because for all Hal's talk of suns and clouds and shining all the brighter by low expectations, by the time his father lies on his deathbed and the crown gleams at him in the follow-spot's third-degree light, he is genuinely trying not to fuck up and far less confident about his chances than he gives off to Falstaff or Poins or even, before now, his father the King. He is never quite untarnished. Barclay may not have memory-welded himself to the role for me in the same way as he did Bosola, but I'd love to hear his Harry, England, and Saint George. Opposite him, Allyn Burrows made such a taut, cocky Hotspur—and sometimes a very funny one, blowing up at his father and baiting his ally Glendower, but he has the skills to back up his warrior's swagger—that I didn't care that the actor had to be at least ten years older than either the historical or Shakespeare's Harry Percy. He reappeared in Part 2 as Ancient Pistol, burlesquing his previous character's firework temper. I feel that I should have more to say about Robert Walsh's Falstaff, but either I am too tired to be profound or he was not as deeply played as the other protagonists. He did have a wonderful bit of business with a battlefield corpse. Dev Luthra as Northumberland will make me watch for him in future.

I have no complaints about the music. Offstage, drums clamor the eager and unrelenting rhythms of war; onstage we get (mostly played by Steven Barkhimer, a one-man consort) clarinets, guitars, melodeons, harps, and human voices. The prologues and epilogues are sung as if by an Elizabethan ballad singer with a hummed drone accompaniment; she is Rumour in a cloak of ears and tongues, but she is also the contemporary voice of the company, unless those couplets about coming back for the next play were Shakespeare. The war-beat is echoed at times by the actors' hands, striking the same tattoo on the wooden sets. The other refrain is their communal singing of Deo gratias, which recurs throughout the play at moments of transition or affirmation. In the last moments of The Coveted Crown—which incorporates portions of Richard II and Henry V—it resolves into the Agincourt Carol. For that alone this production won serious points with me.

Any other reflections will have to wait until I have slept, or at least turned my light out. But The Coveted Crown runs through the 21st of November and for once I have a reviewed a play more than forty-eight hours before it closes; this one is well worth your time.

Compass here, but the needle's shot

My poem "Abite Laeti, Abite Locupletes" has been accepted by Moral Relativism Magazine. I am especially pleased about this for several reasons: it's a new market, the editor is awesome, and the poem is one of my favorites in some time. I would also point out that the first issue is still open to submissions through November 1st, for anyone who finds things like photography and philosophy a not incompatible combination.

It's bright clear autumn outside. So far I approve of this week.