The Melancholy Jaques

Oh man oh man do I have the post-show blues! May and June (and a bit of April and July) were absolutely insane, and I am struggling a little to come back from it all.

But the marathon that was As You Like It has earned a brief post, hasn’t it?! And what better way to eradicate the post-show blues than with a character who lives for the blues and is given the moniker of ‘melancholy’?!

Ahhh I loved being Jaques. I found him to be a character full of contradictions… in a delicious way. He sort of floats through the play taking what he can from everyone he encounters.

He’s usually feigning some kind of disdain or scorn for those he meets, but I think he really just wants to connect. He claims to be miserable but clearly loves to be heard. I can relate!

The location for the production was stunning, but travel to Windsor and weather conditions when rehearsing and performing outside proved to be quite harrowing at times. (For example, all the trains out of London were cancelled on the afternoon of the Saturday performance, and I had to jump into a black cab at Waterloo dramatically declaring, ‘Step on it! I’m an actor!’….and ended up arriving mere minutes before the last show started!!!) Luckily, I met some super awesome fellow actors along the way, and we managed to make a merry time of it.

Missing these clowns and feeling rather melancholy myself yesterday, I decided to push through it by getting dressed and filming Jaques’s famous ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech. I admit, it was rather difficult to scale back my performance from an open-air audience to… a camera in my sitting room. It was also much less fun without other actors to play off of but, ah well, I did my best (sort of, haha). You can check it out on YouTube below!

Since the Orpheus Descending slideshow didn’t seem to work for everyone last time, I’ve included a new GALLERY page to the website where you can check out all the production photos from my past few months! I understand that no one is dying to see more photos of me than they are already forced to on social media, and this is probably only of interest to my mother but… the option is there should you wish to take a peek!

Alrighty, I’ve got a mountain of blog posts to catch up on so I’d better jet. But I’ve missed you and I love you and thank you always for your support!

Peace and love,

xWeekes

Production photos by Alan Bostock.

More information about the production and photos came be found at http://www.yaowtheatre.com.