skizz.biz

Just got back from the theatre, where I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company do Edward III - a play at least partly written by Shakespeare. Its one of a season of 5 early plays which I am hoping to see over the next week or so. They were originally performed at Stratford in 2002, and were a smash hit - so the RSC has revived them for a season in rep at the Gielgud Theatre.

The last time I was at an elizabethan play was when I went to see ‘Twelfth Night’ with Martin at the Globe - a fantastic play I must write up - and so it was a bit of a shock to see one done in a Proscenium arch. I don’t know the theatre where the original production was done, but I’m guessing that it is somewhat in the round in that a lot of the entrances and exits were through the audience. There is also a segment of woodon O framing the stage that is either an attempt to evoke the Globe, or the original theatre or both.

The play itself is a sprawling History play with a great deal of exposition. The opening soliloquy is a long explanatory passage that at times descends into a biblical list of begats - I pity the poor actor lumbered with that role! Fortunately the story gets going fairly quickly, and we see our King Edward launching England into a war on two fronts - one against the scots and the other against the French King John who has usurped the throne from the rightful heir - you guessed it - our own Eddy. I would imagine that Ed’s claim to that throne was a little shaky from the extended and technical explanation of it in the play.

There is an extended interlude in the first act when the King falls in love with the wife of the Earl of Salisbury while fighting the Scots. He tries to force her to betray her husband and sleep with him but after several tries she finally prevails and he comes to his senses and leaves her. It is in this section of the play that we get the closest to some of the insight and depth of character of the great plays, but unfortunately it does not last. When the King leaves for France it is as if she had never been, and the play becomes a series of battles.

We get to see the Black Prince (Prince Edward) who may be familiar as a great and noble character from his other recent appearance in A Knight’s Tale - a greatly underrated film. His father the King refuses to send him aid when he is beset lest he become reliant on it. One way to bring up a child I guess.

We also see the famous incident that inspired Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture The Burghers of Calais - and it was a given that the costumier would copy the famous sculpture.

But for all the swash and buckle the action is fairly featureless - and despite a nice turn from the comic Lodowik (Wayne Cater) the characters fail to really engage. There are a couple of sparks - at one stage King E walks to the front of the stage and addresses the audience as if they were the army - much as Henry V does the same thing - but this is not the Globe*, and the Proscenium arch still keeps the audience out.

It was quite a good show though, and I will be interested to see the others in the series.

*actually it was the Globe, but in 1994 it was renamed to the Gielgud to honour Sir John Gielgud, and to ensure that when Wanamaker finished the ‘new’ Globe, there would only be one Globe in London.

Another lovely day in snowy London (pictures from the BBC) - and typically, all the bbc can do is complain (Londoners struggle past Winston Churchill’s statue).

I’ve been using Mono, the open source port of .NET - and was quite pleased to get the PostgreSql data stuff up and running. I can even use DataSets against postgres.

But there are some bugs in the implementation that will be painful. Time to subscribe to the Mono mailing lists I guess. I’d start on it tonight but I should sleep sometime :-)

OK so it wasn’t much but it did snow yesterday morning - a couple of centimetres on the car roofs and even a bit in the park near work in the City. And I got to ride in through falling snow! Almost made up for the cold :-)

Just got over the idea of being an uncle once and I find out I’m going to be an uncle twice, since my sister Kerrie is now expecting as well. Frightening.

One of my colleagues just got back from Christmas holidays in the Whitsundays, cruising around on a tall ship which his father captains. Jealous, moi?

Meanwhile in London it was cold and cloudless, and while I was riding my bike to work this morning all my neighbours were scraping the ice off their windscreens. A beautiful day.

I have been thinking more about blocks recently, and how they would look in Java. I’ve come up with an implementation that uses inner classes and is is fairly straightforward.

It would be quite easy to implement this as a source transformation in a Java compiler, in much the same way that C# does with delegates and function pointers (which are also actually implemented as inner classes)

The full description and implementation is on my wiki at http://skizz.plus.com/mywiki/BlocksInJava

Essentially, a block like

//Ideal syntax
public block void foreach(Object obj) {
for ( int i=0; i<size(); i++ ) {
yield(get(i));
}
}

could be implemented in Java as:

public Block foreachBlock = new Block() {
public void run(BlockCaller caller) {
for (int i = 0; i < size(); i++) {
Object[] values = new Object[] { get(i) };
if ( caller.yield( values ) == BlockCaller.BREAK )
return;
}
}
};

The block is used as follows:

//Ideal syntax
list.foreach( Object item ) {
System.out.println(item);
}

implemented in Java as:

list.foreachBlock.run(
new BlockCaller() {
public int yield(Object[] args) {
Object item = args[0];
System.out.println(item);
return CONTINUE;
}
}
);

I nearly ended up sitting at home on the couch for New Year but at the last minute made a dash for the bus and went to Laura’s place in Holborn - a really cool flat set amongst office buildings somewhere where you’d never expect anyone to live.
I made it with 15 minutes to spare and we did all the normal New Yeary things like drinking champagne etc. Strange to think that it had already been 2003 in Adelaide for 10 and a half hours…
I stayed until 2AM - mostly listening to music while completely wasted - and then walked back to Tottenham Court Road to catch the bus home. But there were so many people coming that way that I figured it was not a good idea and walked to Euston Station instead. I caught a night bus from there - and I can now vouch personally for the fact that it is possible to fit more than a hundred people on a single double decker bus. Got home about 3am with a serious bout of the munchies, so I made myself sausages and eggs before going to sleep.
And now that I have cleaned up and re-arranged my room and done some exercise (yeah - how long will that last :-) it really feels like a new year…
So happy new year…