On rebuilding the fourth wall

T.H White’s The Once and Future King has been sat on my bedside table for a not insignificant while now, but slow progress is still progress. I started book three, the Lancelot-centric The Ill-Made Knight, on my Thursday morning commute, and promptly put it down again because the first two paragraphs made me fully catatonic. To whit:

The boy thought that there was something wrong with him. All through his life—even when he was a great man with the world at his feet—he was to feel this gap: something at the bottom of his heart of which he was aware, and ashamed, but which he did not understand. There is no need for us to try to understand it. We do not have to dabble in a place which he preferred to keep secret.

The Ill-Made Knight, ch. 1

Nothing Much to Do: the perfect Shakespeare webseries

Every year for the last three years, I have been lucky enough to see a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Considering it was my first Shakespeare and still a hot favourite this has been something of a dream run for me, but when it eventually runs dry I take great comfort in the fact that my favourite adaptation will always be right there on YouTube. Not Kenneth Branagh’s, not even David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s, though both are excellent. I’m talking about Nothing Much To Do, the 2014 web series by Kiwi creators The Candle Wasters that sees Shakespearean drama transplanted into an Auckland highschool with almost frightening accuracy.