Dover Knights Starring Jackie Chan

More fight choreography tonight, starting with the climactic Edgar/Edmund fight (looking good, but lots more work ahead of us), then working backwards to the fight between Edgar and Oswald.

I told Andrew and the actors that this was the one fight in the play where I felt humour could help us. Gloster has just attempted suicide by jumping off an imaginary cliff (which has the potential for black humour itself). Now, just as he's starting to regain some joie de vivre, along comes Oswald (of all people), ready to off Gloster for no good reason. The ensuing fight is between a coward (Oswald) and an only recently-recovered madman, with a blind man hanging about on the periphery. How can that not be a recipe for slapstick?

Alas, as hard as we tried to make it funny, it didn't quite seem to get there. I kept urging Andrew to incorporate Gloster in the fight (blind man wanders inadvertantly into the fray), but he kept worrying that the fight was turning into a Jackie Chan-style brawl. I told him I didn't mind, but he still refrained.

Well, he's worked on a lot more fights than I have (and even on another production of Lear), and his instincts for all the other fights seem to be bang on. I'm prepared to bow to his aesthetic. And if we can wring a chuckle or two at the outset, before the fight turns deadly (a line like Edgar's "I'll pick your teeth, sir" can't not get a laugh), then we'll both be satisfied. And compromise is at the heart of any collaboration.