Monday, August 06, 2012

British is your only dialect...

...for sonnets.

Say what you want about British slang with its knicker/knacker/knackered zaniness, it doesn't matter what they say so much as how they say it: British people tawk fancy, and everything sounds more intelligent and refined when they are clipping their Ts and eliding their Rs.

Claire Warden is one of these British type people and she made my sonnet "The world my love is composed" sound amazing. And of course she made Shakespeare's sonnet 147 sound amazing too, but it's a tad more difficult to make my sonnet sound amazing. I'm only allowing British people to read my sonnets aloud from now on.

An interesting aspect of British dialect is that it's changed since Shakespeare's time, which is why Shakespeare meant for these lines from sonnet 147 to rhyme:

My reason, the physician to my love
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, 
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve 
Desire is death, which physic did except. 

But making the word love sound like "loove" or approve sound like "apruv" - and probably they neither sounded like that but both rather had a different vowel sound entirely - is just too much, so the rhyme is allowed to disappear.

Claire isn't only a great voice and great actor though - she's very athletic too, and recently went skydiving for her second anniversary with her husband (the official second anniversary gift is supposed to be china.) And in a very unusual production of HAMLET this summer for which she was cast as the Player King, she rocked her amazing costume, as you can see in this image from her web site clairewarden.com:

You can click it to see a larger version. She's an all-around, versatile, consummate performer and why she hasn't been hired for the most recent James Bond movie I'll never understand.

She's also been doing readings of my JULIA & BUDDY since the earliest days of readings at NYCPlaywrights, so of course I want her to perform in the world premier of the full-length version, which will be coming along any day now.

In the meantime, I had her do my monologue "The Dark Lady Sonnets." It contains two sonnets because, obviously, that's what  contemporary audiences are clamoring for - sonnets.