In the last two posts I have been boring on elucidating (that's a posh word, innit?!) the delicate difference between the general and the specific and asking which constitutes reality. Well, sometimes the two meet and in that conjunction what wonders might we see? For example, in one brief incident just recently the mostly real and sensible world we all inhabit bumped into the totally loony world peopled entirely by swivel-eyed crack-pots who, in a crueler age, would have been locked up for their own good! You missed it? Let me, courtesy of The Mail, do some more 'elucidating'!
As I write, there is a production of Shakespeare's Richard III running in London with the well-known film and TV actor, Martin Freeman, playing the title role. As we all know - er, we do, don't we? - during the course of this XXX-murder-fest, from which today's 'likkle kiddie-winkies' should be protected, the unfortunate Duke of Clarence is murdered by being submerged in a vat of malmsy, "a consumation devoutly to be wished" by your average alcoholic but not, alas, by the Duke at that particular moment in time. Anyway, this now being the post-post-post-modernist era, the director ignores Shakespeare - heh! what did he know? - and instead has poor old Clarence dunked in a water tank containing some pretty goldfish.
Well, of course, you know what's coming with all the grim inevitability of your annual tax return, but I will let The Mail provide the details:
A woman who bought a front-row seat to watch Martin Freeman, star of the BBC’s Sherlock, play Richard at the Trafalgar Studios theater in London, claimed to have seen a fish squished during a scene in which Clarence’s life is despatched in a tank of water.
She reported the production to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals group (Peta), claiming the goldfish was ‘ground up with the gravel and pushed up against the sides of the tank’ as the actor ‘thrashed around wildly’.
Peta contacted director Jamie Lloyd to complain the life of the goldfish was being placed in peril of injury or death.
Are you crying now? No, no, not for poor old Clarence, I mean for the poor 'likkle golden fishy-wishies' because now, not only was one of them "squished" but after the theater management took immediate action, all those 'fishy-wishy' actors were banned from the show and now they're out of work. I tell you, it's a hard life being an actor but perhaps, with a bit of luck, someone might mount a revivial of "A Fish Called Wanda", who knows?