Saturday 24 October 2015

'The Play Is The Thing' or 'Goodbye, Daylight Saving Time!'

It's nice to go to the theatre, a fascinating experience on almost every occasion. Tonight it will be 'The 39 Steps' at the Lyric Theatre in Carmarthen, presumably the same version I saw in Aberystwyth many moons ago. When did a 'moon' stop being a common measurement of time? We should bring it back. 'The 39 Steps' is one of the most adapted novels in history, and one of the most frequently 'loosely' adapted. It's just a wonderful and malleable adventure story, which I'll get around to describing when next I read it. The most famous version is probably the Hitchcock film with Donat and Carroll, followed distantly by any of the others that you would care to name. I'll write about tonight's production tomorrow, if it's noteworthy.

Daylight Savings Time ends here in Britain, and indeed in the whole EU, tonight. Yes, the season of false time is ended and real time is upon us once again, and I get to reiterate my abortive rant on the horrors of foisting such a bodge on the public. Oh, so many people get depressed, internally confused, and lost that it surely can't be worth it. Can it? Couldn't people affected just shift their own working hours if they wanted to? In any case, it will be nice to not be running a dual clock in my mind for the next few months, and it will relieve the seasonal blues to a great extent.

Yes, seasonal depression is a real thing. Trust me on this.

What would it be like to be part of a theatrical production? I've often considered it, and then realised that a lack of personal tact is probably not the best thing to throw into a high pressure mixture... In any case, I don't have enough hats to be an amateur actor. I'm reasonably sure that you have to have lots of hats, to serve as character motivation. Isn't that right? Don't you at least need a safari hat and a policeman's helmet?

O.

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