The Queen

Dame Ian McKellen is coming to Singapore in July in his capacity as a member of the
Royal Shakespeare Company. The troupe will be, um, trooping to my neck of the woods to do performances of Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekov's The Seagull with Singapore as their only stop in Asia. It's only this year that the esteemed actor has decided to join Trevor Nunn's production of both plays and it's just simply impossible for a pretentious artsy-artsy culture vulture like me to miss.

However when my friend Sandy and I went to the box office to buy the tickets, King Lear was already sold out with the exception of a few seats for, get this, SGD400. Yikes. As much we wanted to see Magneto kick ass in his gay flesh and on stage, this was too steep a price of admission. The only cheapo seats available were for the last performance of The Seagull for SGD80. And these seats were at the last row. Oh, well. I guess eighty bucks is a steal for the trifecta of Gandalf, Trevor Nunn, and, of course, Chekov. Yes. Gotta give props to the great Russian comrade. He took all that shit from that asshole Kirk in Star Trek.

Speaking of Shakespeare, did you read about this acting troupe called the Laoag Shakespeare Company based in Ilocos Norte? The group is planning to reinvent some of the bard's most famous tragedies like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet by doing these plays in Ilocano. In addition, the settings of the plays would be in contemporary Ilocos and would highlight certain facets of the proud Ilocano culture.

The first of Shakespeare's tragedies which the group will attempt to tackle is the immortal tale of the Thane of Glamis, his wife, their plan to whack King Duncan in their (mainly the wife's) ambitious plan to takeover the Scottish throne, and the three witches prophesizing everything. The Laoag Shakespeare Company plans to set the tragedy in an Ilocano carinderia where the Thane of Glamis is now a lowly cook with devious dreams of owning the carinderia and being egged on by his bitch of a wife. The only way for their carinderia stealing scheme to succeed is to murder the carinderia's owner named Dungca. And what would be the title of this play?

Yep, you guessed it. Pinacbeth.