The Bard is in the room (by the power of zoom)

Many of you may know that the last 4 weeks of my second term at drama school have been forced online thanks to rising Covid case numbers in this new (and already unhappy) year. Needless to say it's been a strange adjustment from 3D to 2, and there are but a handful of benefits I can salvage from the situation: being mask-free and with easy access to tea. Besides that, I know the whole ArtsEd year group have been feeling the square-eyed strain and square metre constraints of moving from the Catholic centre to a bedroom near you. But with only one week to go, the end very much is in sight. That is, if we haven't all become too visually impaired thanks to the copious computer hours we've clocked up during this latest lockdown.

And with the end comes our first (and hopefully last) zoom performance. We have the pleasure of bringing Shakespeare's 'As You Like It' to the crappy-quality, permanently freezing, and disturbing virtual backgrounded world of zoom. Alas our bandwidth (and our egos) won't stretch to allow members of the public to zoom-bomb our performance, or watch it from the waiting room wings, so you'll have to just take my word for how brilliant we all were. RSC eat your heart out.

All jokes aside, I think as a cohort we have embraced the slightly chaotic nature that a zoom performance brings, and the invitation to just have a bit of fun has been far too tempting amongst all the doom and gloom. Hence the appearance of WWF fighter 'Charles the Viper', the innumerable instances of gender-bending (boys playing girls who are playing boys pretending to be girls?!), and the Papa Smurf lookalike of Corin the shepherd (played by yours truly). We have all relished the opportunity to invite a bit of silliness into our bedrooms, as the somewhat savage world continues to pound at our window panes.

This embracing of the chaos has oft been driven by our Shakespeare director, whose palpable enthusiasm and erratic energy has been just the antidote to the zoom gloom that threatens as the weeks drag on. Oscar has been using games to get us to keep the text alive, and to avoid the perilous 'Shakespeare voice' that so many actors fall foul of. These games include making a lot of 'non-verbal' sounds (yes, ladies and gentlemen, there is a version of 'As You Like It' that borders on the pantomime - Oh yes it does!), heckling fellow performers ('Say what?', 'Come again?'), a sprinkling use of expletives, and even a rendition in the style of an Italian Opera. I am yet to work out which games are for our benefit, and which are more for Oscar's amusement...

But in spite of finding a fair few moments of enjoyment throughout this online process (highlights including Animal Studies, in which I play a Grizzly Bear. Only once you've spent half an hour crawling around your room in search for salmon can you truly understand what inner peace is), I know I am very much looking forward to online classes coming to an end. Although there is some badge of resilience that I think we can all wear as a year group now, to say that we made it through 5 weeks of digital acting classes. If that is not Oscar-worthy (who knew our director's name would provide such fruitful pun opportunities?) then I don't know what is.

All this zoom fatigue, coupled with lockdown burnout, means that we're probably all having days where we just don't feel it. No is the only word we can muster. Shall I eat something nutritious and good for me? Should I do some exercise and get fit? Should I put on some real clothes and stop dressing like a specimen from 'Build-a-Bear'? All these questions can feel like insurmountable obstacles, and to roll out of bed might sometimes feel like a bridge too far. And I guess there is only the smallest bit of consolation in that we're all feeling this either a little or a lot of the time. My advice to combat this (advice which I am hardly qualified to give and for which you did not ask) is that a little escapism goes a long way.

I'm not going to suggest you all go around pretending to be Pangolins, or embody the letter 'J' for an afternoon, but there is something to be said for taking a bit more of a 'f*** it' attitude to life at the moment. If you want to be a red-carpet diva for the weekend, do it. If you want to speak solely in a Scottish accent every Saturday, do it. If you decide - like Alice often used to - to be a cat for a day, and deny all use of knives and forks, then just go and do it. If nothing else, there is something that this MA has taught me. We all spend so much time worrying about what we look like (physically but also behaviourally), and if we're doing things 'right', and if people will 'like' us or think we're 'weird'. But these things are both completely arbitrary, and also ultimately beyond our control. So we might as well have a bit of fun and put two fingers up to anyone and anything that tries to limit us.

So there is my golden nugget for this post - do whatever feels right and good in the moment, no matter how small, silly or superfluous, and screw the consequences for once. I would like to think it is what Shakespeare would have wanted. Even if just to shamelessly bring my post full circle back to where it began.

p.s. please don't tell your housemates / neighbours / pets where I live, because I am not liable and will refuse point blank to handle any complaints. Unless they are accompanied by a crate of cheese and wine.