In addition to the musical wargames, we're going to be putting on a fantasy/sci fi game, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). The idea is that a small English village, Nether Tiddlington, has used a rather tenuous connection to the Immortal Bard to set up an annual Shakespeare festival to drive up tourism revenue. This year, they decided to hold it on an old henge site outside town. It turns out this was an old Druid site and the mix of mystical location, iambic pentameter, and bad weather has resulted in an act of unintended ritual dramaturgical magic. The result is that a gate to another dimension has opened and it's inhabitants are now streaming into this world. However, this alternate universe is one in which the works of Shakespeare are literally real, and not only in the original written forms but in the various adaptation that have been done since. The local inhabitants are now faced with hordes of very well-spoken but anachronistic invaders.
Here's some shots of the village itself.
This is only one half of the table. The second half will be more countryside with the Druid site featured prominently.
The invaders will each have their own goal, most related to the female leads of their respective stories. They will include Ian McKellan's Richard III
Laurence Fishburne's Othello
Marlon Brando's Marc Antony from Julius Caesar:
Michael Fassbender's McBeth:
And Laurence Olivier's Henry V (I prefer the Branagh version but I'm already using KB for Hamlet and having 2 Branaghs would just be silly):
I'm also including the Leonardo Di Caprio version of Romeo but I haven't finished painting the Capulet's Hawaiian shirts
The town is defended by its hardy constables, Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman, recently transferred here after the unpleasantness at Sandford. See Hot Fuzz.
The main objective for most of the invaders will be the recovery of the much put-upon Shakespearean heroines who have been gathered into a domestic violence shelter by their protector, feminist solicitor, Porthia Burbage. They are, from the left, Ophelia, Princess Katharine of France, Desdemona, Juliet, Porthia, Lady McBeth, and Cleopatra (I know she doesn't appear in Julius Caesar but Shakespeare did write A & C as a sequel and I would have loved to have seen Brando in that).
4 comments:
"Keep a gamester from the dice, and a good student from his book, and it is wonderful." The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I, Scene III.
Not to be pedantic but that quote is actually from Act III, Scene I. I'm currently in rehearsal for the Merry Wives, I'm playing Falstaff.
I played Falstaff in "Merry Wives" three different times (in three different cities). . . it is a lot of fun . . . even the time Mistress Quickly forgot one of her scenes with me and I had to turn our conversation into a monologue.
"Break a leg", sir.
-- Jeff
And what about the Ralph Fiennes Coriolanus in full urban combat pixel camo?
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