Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of

No more pain
no more strain
now I'm sane but ...
I would rather be gaga...

People keep saying how adorable Eleven is. I wish I could see it, but I just don't. He doesn't do a thing for me. The only time I ever really liked him was in The Big Bang when he was saying goodbye to little Amy. I don't know it it's the writing, or what - I think it's just MS doesn't appeal to me.

I have tried very hard not to be a Tennant fangirl (I'm 52 for heaven's sake!). I know that time is over and nothing will bring it back, but for the last week or two I have been missing him as the Doctor quite overwhelmingly. Although I think he's very talented and I do enjoy seeing him in other things, I think it's Ten rather than DT himself that fascinates me. My fanfiction career was entirely focussed on him - I just seemed to get him without really trying and never found it any effort to write from his POV, even though I've often heard other writers, professional and amateur, claim that you can never get inside the Doctor's head. Get inside? I climbed in and made myself at home there for four years.

It wasn't always a pleasant sensation. After some episodes - FoB and JE in particular, I was so emotionally drained I felt like taking to my bed for days on end. I was very embarrassed by this and it made my family rather fed up with me but I seemed to be incapable of controlling it at the time. I expected it to be a relief not to be so emotionally involved with DW and I can't imagine ever feeling the same about any other show. I'm probably a better person now that I'm not. And yet I miss it terribly. It's very like recalling a love affair that completely messed with your head.

In fact, I've come to the conclusion that what's really happened is that I've returned to the status quo pre 2005 where DW was concerned - I wasn't that bothered about it. (I say 2005 because I get on board about halfway through CE's tenure, and funnily enough I thought I wasn't going to like Ten for a while). But when I first saw The Satan Pit I cried - the bit where he said "I believe in her!" and later when they were reunited in the TARDIS. I didn't even like Rose all that much, but I loved her for making the Doctor so happy. And when Donna showed up, I loved her even more.

I think a lot of my fic was meta in disguise. It was a way of saying, "What if they'd done it that way?" Or sometimes just little sketches broadening out a character. I've never felt the slightest desire to write anything on Eleven, Amy and Rory - there's just nothing that snags at me, catches my interest. And as for 10.5 and Rose, it's very nice to think they're out there somewhere, but it's like an old school friend who moved away, and you said you'd stay in touch but you didn't really, and they grow a little smaller with every passing year.

Yeah, I know everything has its time and everything dies. I've given the new team a fair chance - 17 episodes including the Xmas Special, and it's still a fun show to watch with my kids and their friends, and I love the meta on it, but I feel more and more as if Elvis has left the building and there are fewer and fewer people around who remember him. Most of the time I'm a happy, positive, contented and forward-looking individual, but occasionally it hits me how much I miss him. And I can't help feeling sad.

I have a ticket - 25th July, a Monday! I was planning to go down for a few days anyway, as I did last summer, to catch up on the Globe season. They're doing a midnight performance of Dr Faustus, which I rather fancy. And if I'm staying at LSE Bankside, as I did last year, it's literally three minutes' walk from the Globe so even at that time of night, i'd be okay getting back. I can recommend Bankside - it's pretty basic and communal but I'm not complaining about that - you get a more spacious room than at most hotels in central London for around £40 a night and the location is unbeatable. Only drawback is you can only go when the students aren't there.

Spent yesterday afternoon in the John Rylands Library on Manchester University campus - I must go down there more often. I got more work done in those few hours than I have in the last three months. I'm at that stage where the pressure to stop reading and start writing is building, but still held back by fear and writers' block. Today I got out all the books I've read and copied out quotes on various themes I want to look at - things like London (they all mention heads on pikes on Tower Bridge, which my supervisor claims is a myth, and go out of their way to be gory in a very Horrible Histories way), Shakespeare at Work and Gender (or what happens when boys wear dresses, and vice versa).

This was a good use of time and has made the prospect of beginning to write my next chapter a lot less daunting.

Also feeling a slight sense of smugness that a couple of years ago I wrote Ten and Donna into a fic as Beatrice and Benedick. Thinking semi-seriously of starting a sequel in which they discover the TARDIS has broken down and they're stuck in Elizabethan London, so to pass the time their mate Will writes them into his new play, which would of course be Much Ado About Nothing. Donna, of course, would have to disguise herself as a boy when off stage.

In my After the Storm AU, Journey's End happened but nothing in the Specials. It would be a neat twist on Shakespeare's penchant for twinning plots if 10.5 somehow finds his way to the same period and location and starts having an affair with Queen Elizabeth! (But to make it work I'd have to fiddle around with dates, since by the time Much Ado was written Gloriana was a bit of a toothless old hag - and if the two Doctors aren't around in the same place to get mistaken for one another it's not nearly as much fun).

I even have a title - A Merry War sounds good.

What think you, gentles all?

A friend writes:

I was reading a lovely book entitled, "Master Class In Fiction Writing" by Adam Sexton.

This book draws on the very essences of storytelling, which naturally will appeal to me, by illuminating examples from classic works. And I loved how the author illustrates the exact problem with RTD's storyline as a whole and coherent narrative. Using Jane Eyre as a template he states, Not until Jane Eyre can tell us, "Reader, I married him."--or at the point where Rochester marries another, or Jane marries another or one of them dies--are we finished with the story of Jane's growth and development.

He points out that a protagonist must embody a concrete need, rather than some abstract one, for the reader to connect with the character. That is, Rose wishes that she would never be separated from the Doctor. Rose consistently acts upon that belief. And, Ten consistently responds to it, though he is shown to be emotionally torn, not by lack of love, but perhaps by something else, and finally physically torn into two men. But we are still left without concrete resolutions, because Rose is shown to reject the Doctor she's given in JE.

This led me, after a long absence from these pages, to look back, with the benefit of hindsight and hopefully some objectivity, at why The End of Time didn't work for me. Some of my reflections, cut and pasted from replies to her, follow. It's a good time, at least from my POV, to reflect and take stock on the RTD years in general. It's almost to the day five years since Rose aired, and of course the Moffatt era officially starts tomorrow. My daughter has a friend coming to stay who's been living in Lebanon for the past few months and really wants to catch up, so we'll be taking a look at all of the Specials before we settle down to the S5 opener on April 3rd.

The point Sexton makes about characters needs, how they have to be specific, not abstract, makes me wonder if RTD's biggest problem was explaining what the Doctor's specific needs were and then following them through. Once we define a character's specific needs we humanize them, make them into a person the reader can identify with.

But of course, the Doctor isn't human, and there's a continual fear of losing his alien-ness by giving him a human motivation. It's tempting to keep making the Doctor's motivations abstract because then you can claim to be writing great and meaningful drama. (Not that Shakespeare ever had a problem with that particular either/or). And there's another difficulty. Anyone involved with DW professionally is terrified of doing anything that might finish the Doctor's story. Once he stops, the reasoning goes, then the show stops. So as soon as you begin to characterise the Doctor in a realistic way (and for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that Classic Who never did), once you give him an inner life, that drive towards completion will be there, and it's totally fundamental.

It's part of the age-old tension between storytelling and the maintenance of a brand, a franchise, that eventually the story stops. Otherwise, it's not a satisfying story. The battle cry we hear at EoT "but the story goes on" is, in fact, the worst thing a story can do. That's why sequel after sequel is rolled out in modern storytelling, until the original narrative collapses under the weight of its own silliness and contradiction, or people lose interest, or both.

There's a difference between a satisfying ending and a happy ending. It's arguable that even King Lear has a satisfying ending. Lear as a character has to square a circle - he wants to give up his power but can't deal with the reality of doing so. In the end, even in the darkest, most nihilistic productions, that gets answered - he finds that power is worthless. Or occasionally you come across a production - the Gregori Kozintzev movie, for example, where he discovers he's a member of the human race and learns to appreciate real love, but it's too late. But he has still developed, even when he cries with his dead daughter in his arms, "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no life at all?" The insight to ask that question comes at the end of a story of personal growth.

So, to return to the Doctor, he's trapped in a bind - he has to want something, but we have to separate out the bit of him that wants that something and push it away, in case it diminishes him, or at least diminishes his bankability. The real sadness of RTD's Who is a very predictable one - it became a brand, trapped by its own success and all the compromises that involves. I was very intrigued to read in the new Writer's Tale that Julie G tried to persuade Billie to return for the Specials. Even then, they were trying to do a damage limitation exercise. But eventually what happened was a very modern triumph of two successful brands - David Tennant as tragic actor in the Shakespearian mould, which demands narrative closure, and DW as the never-ending, continually resetting story, which demands the precise reverse. If the show had been less successful, if it had clearly run its course by the end of S2 or S3, we might well have got our happy ending. As it was, it was just too valuable for the POTB let that happen.

And so we come to the finale.

It seems to me that End of Time, from the title downwards, is an increasingly hollow and frantic attempt for RTD, again, to have his cake and eat it. Lots of things about the finale screamed, "This is closure! It's the end, really it is - it's what I was going to do all along!"

We get the odd attitude to regeneration, for example. Tragic Doctor reacting to it as death, when in fact it's something quite different. Regeneration is pushed to the absolute limit - it happens agonizingly slowly with a huge amount of rage against the dying of the light. That's because, deep down, The Doctor as conceived by RTD has become human, and so he's not dreading a regeneration, he's dreading the end that death is to a human being. What we are really seeing is 10.5 expressing his fears, facing Ten's regeneration. No wonder the whole thing feels unresolved.

Then, the attempt to round things off with Gallifrey and the Master. I felt that was the least unsuccessful narrative strand because there was some sense of closure there - what happened did seem to vindicate the Doctor's original choice that has caused him such agony throughout his narrative. But again, that was never commented on, instead the story limped on and shoved it into a siding. By this time, Doctor as tragic hero had turned out to be such a success that nobody dared to give the poor man a satisfying ending. (It could have happened - he could have realised that with his choice to kill his people confessed and vindicated, he'd found a measure of peace. Arguably, the Ninth Doctor went out on a similar note. He might not have wanted to regenerate, but he didn't fight it).

So we couldn't allow Ten a moment to reflect on the hugely important issue of his genocide. We couldn't resolve the Master's narrative arc - nobody ever does that. People complain about RTD throwing toys out of the pram, but personally I wish he'd had the courage, or the opportunity, to sling out a few more. Instead he had to keep everything.

Having created two conflicting alternative narratives for the Doctor, RTD attempted to ride both horses simultaneously. But that's impossible - as soon as one is resolved, by implication you negate the other. I get the impression that it was 10.5's story that RTD wanted to tell by that stage - the simple, human one. He was bored by the magnitude of the issues he'd set up and no wonder - they'd all been rehashed ad nauseum. He didn't want to think about why the Doctor didn't show up and help out Jack with the 456 - he didn't really want to write about that Doctor any more. Brown Ten wasn't his Doctor; he was a corporate creation.

There's always a part of RTD that does whatever he likes, but because of the bind he was in, by EoT it wasn't coming out in very artistically satisfying ways. Instead, he tried to give Ten a head transplant, by writing about a human/Time Lord hybrid saying goodbye rather than a character that was consistent with the original. So, while the last stand with WIlf is a beautiful scene, and the acting is fantastically good, in the end it just doesn't feel in character. I don't feel that the Doctor could stand up to Rassilon only to pout and act out when he can't hang onto his particular body. It's just too small, too human. He can rebel against the Time Lords but that doesn't fundamentally change who he is - or rather, if it did change him fundamentally, he'd be in Pete's World now with Rose. Once he walks out on that possibility, he's proven himself to be more Time Lord than human and there's no narratively consistent going back.

And then we had all those goodbyes. They didn't work for me because they all said the same thing - I don't want to go. I've learned nothing and I don't want to go. I still think Jack's issues can be resolved by fixing him up with a date. I've convinced myself that money will fix what happened to Donna. And I've never come to terms with losing Rose, I still need to do something incredibly dangerous and cross the timeline so I can see her again.

Every imposition of closure screamed lack of closure. Yes, it gave Tragic Hero Tennant loads to do. But the problem with a big farewell speech is you can only do it once. After that it becomes mawkish. Say what the audience needs to hear, "I'm going to die, but I've learned something." Or at the very least, there needs to be acceptance. Ten's death gave us neither.

"It is hard to imagine a less digestible festive sandwich for Tennant fans: Time Lord/Prince of Denmark/Time Lord. We time-travel from teatime jollity — albeit brilliant in its own way — to Shakespeare’s masterpiece and back again."

That's Helen Rumbelow on the Christmas Telly, writing in today's Sunday Times. Helen, I wonder if you actually watched DW this year? I think there were more laughs in Hamlet. Having said that, it's not a bad article. The description of DT having a "punk intelligence" as Hamlet was perceptive.

Heard David Tennant on Desert Island Discs this morning, and he was absolutely lovely. It's such a clever format - that's why it's lasted all these years. Asking someone about their favourite music is both non-threatening and revealing, and he was relaxed and down-to-earth as he discussed his childhood at the manse (writing down details of the choccy bars his gran gave him, as each one was enjoyed), through to touring the Highlands and Islands with Brecht in a minibus ("They get a lot of socialist theatre in the Highlands and Islands whether they like it or not. It's Scotland - you get given what's good for you) and the endearing tidbit that the DW cast all sang along to "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs.

One thing really struck me about his choice of tracks (inevitably including "Me and the Farmer" and "The Pretenders"). They were all narratives, character studies, even the closest one to grandstanding stadium rock ("Dignity"). That's the actor in him I suppose - a fascination with the process of revealing character through performance. There was a lovely moment when Kirsty Young gently probed him about non-academic milestones experienced at drama school, and he replied with lovely evasiveness that when he and his mate went out busking in Glasgow and sang "Over and Gone" it was never discussed, but his friend always took the verse about losing your virginity.

Come to think of it, "Over and Gone" is an excellent opener for the proceedings at this stage in his Doctor Who experience. Bless him, he really is lovely.

Here's a link to the programme info page - if you're in the UK you can catch it again on Friday at 9.00am, or Listen Again. It's also available as a podcast.

Footnote - if you've any generous impulses left at this stage in the festive season, you might care to download David's top choice - "White Wine in the Sun" by Tim Minchin - there was a campaign to get it to the Christmas Number One and although that was somewhat overshadowed by RATM it still charted well and a portion of the profits are going to the National Autistic Society.

Tom has an offer from his first choice of university - Sheffield - to read Philosophy (AAB). That is achievable if he works hard and he's delighted and very motivated. It's almost a shock, because he's quite a late developer, to see him actively preparing himself to leave home in ten months' time. We went down to Essex, his second choice, on Wednesday to have a look around. The course is very good but it's a long haul - we were up at five to get the train and weren't back until after ten in the evening. But they've given him two B's and I think he'd be fine if he ended up there - he can imagine himself there quite easily.

It's been a really demanding week. Becky's been on a killer GCSE Mocks schedule and suffering from a heavy cold - late nights and two or three exams a day. She needs excellent grades if she's going to move on to Withington Girls' School, which is very academic, and that's what she wants to do. I'd love to see her reach that goal, because they rejected her application five years ago and all her friends went there - however, the Sixth Form at the school where she goes now is also excellent, and she has a firm offer from them.

Meanwhile I'm struggling with Shakespeare and Women. I've found this unit really hard work, unlike the previous two. It's very performance based and I've had to learn a whole new vocabulary, since I'm used to engaging with texts critically. Suddenly it's all Laban and Stanislavski, with huge amounts of reading to do. I haven't quite gelled with the course convener either - she's lovely as a person but her background is entirely dramaturgy, so much so that I think she finds it almost impossible to imagine what it's like to lack that professional vocabulary. She keeps telling us what she wants but it's a dialogue of the deaf. I wish I had David Tennant on call to ask for a few tips, but that would be distracting...

Next term I'll be doing Legacy, which is looking at the way people have adapted Shakespeare texts, right through to things like Forbidden Planet and Kiss Me Kate. That's far more my kind of thing. But first I have another essay hanging over me, and I got poor marks for my last so the pressure's really on.

I go back and forth a lot over all the DW stuff. For the first time I'm feeling that the hype's been overdone here in the UK. Recent clips from EoT suggest that there'll be at least some fun in it, but then you could have said that about Army of Ghosts and then look at Doomsday...I'm out of sympathy with RTD's vision for the show and I can feel myself holding back from emotional investment, because I'll get hurt again. I also feel that too much doom is not appropriate for an Xmas special of a family show - I'm not thinking Disney but I would like a fundamental optimism ot be present, rather than just more opportunities for Tennant to emote. Anyway, we'll see.

As the Tenth Doctor's time draws to an end, I feel I'd like to do something lasting to express my gratitude for all the amazing work David Tennant has put into the role.

Right now David is throwing his weight behind the fund-raising effort for the new Royal Shakespeare Company theatre in Stratford-upon Avon. You can read more about it here:

There are two options - one is to sponsor a brick for £50.00 and the other is to sponsor a seat. There are just a few left to be named and prices start from £1,200. That sounds a lot, but if every member of the biggest LJ David Tennant fan community gave just 21p (I think that's around 50c) it would be enough to put a seat with the Doctor's name on it in the theatre for the next 25 years (after that they reserve the right to change the dedication).

So how about it? How many people would be prepared to stump up a bit of cash to say thank you to David by supporting a venture close to his heart? Leave a comment here or at ruth.waterton@gmail.com (completely without obligation at this stage) and we'll see what can be done.

STOP PRESS - I've been in touch with davidtennant.com and apparently they're already talking to the RSC. So I'll keep you posted.

1. The only thing she would have changed about him was his name. A couple of text messages would have saved them. Romeo and Juliet

2. She rejected him, thinking he played her sister false, but it turned out to be a game of mixed-up doubles. Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana, The Comedy of Errors

3. These two played a merry war, but in the end he stopped her mouth. Beatrice and Benedick - Much Ado about Nothing

4. He loved not wisely but too well. Othello and Desdemona

5. A single mother in the Midlands, but at least she got the second-best bed. William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.

6. He said her cap became her not .....Petruchio and Katerina, Taming of the Shrew

7. Her skin was dark - but did she play fair? 154 x 14 lines, yet this OT3 remains a mystery. Shakespeare, the Dark Lady and a mysterious young man - The Sonnets

8. Banish this old friend and you banish all the world, but in the end the young man proved ruthless. Falstaff and Hal, Henry V

9. A year of hospital visiting and the lady’s his, but is that too long for a play? Berowne and Rosaline, Love's Labour's Lost

10. Would he open the right box – and could she plead her case? - Bassanio and Portia, The Merchant of Venice

11. If you wear a crown, avoid this couple’s guest bedroom. - The Macbeths, The "Scottish Play"

12. In a world of secrets and lies, a true friend is more valuable than the ecstasy of love. And that man lived to tell his story. Hamlet and Horatio

"if thou lovest me....
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story"

David Tennant has played Romeo, Berowne, Antipholus of Ephesus and of course Hamlet for the RSC. He has also starred as Benedick in the BBC Audio production of "Much Ado About Nothing"

Well done and thanks for joining in the fun - particularly azalaisdep  who responded with a full house of correct answers within ten minutes!

Here's a final conundrum for you:

What links the Doctor, a double-decker bus and a fairy bank in Shakespeare?
(Clue - Act ii, scene i) Solution (don't click if you're avoiding spoilers) here

Just to get back to the really important stuff - what the hell is the BBC playing at with the DW rumours right now?

( Spoilers - not that I know anything new... )

Just in case anyone was wondering, there is a good reason why Berowne is in blue in LLL. The RSC stage is black and very reflective. If you can just imagine the effect on the average impressionable female of very sexy young men in Elizabethan pantaloons and tights on said surface...well, you'll understand why the other three noble Lords are attired in white and Berowne....isn't.

The RSC just don't have the staff to cope with a mass fangasm safely. There are some nice posters of Hamlet up in the Circle Bar now. I wish they'd had the new LLL poster in the shop - I'd have picked up one or two, I think.

To be honest I'm still amazed by how lucky I was to get a ticket. I hadn't booked. I literally walked in off the street on Friday at around 5 pm and asked what was available. I ended up in the gallery but that's okay - I saw it, that's the main thing.

I've seen the play before at the Globe and it's not the most accessible of Shakespeare's. There's not much story to it but Berowne gets a couple of glorious speeches about love. It's theme, if there is one, is the contrast between the dance of courtship and the reality of having a relationship with somebody, and there's a shock ending which throws this into stark relief. Berowne has an answer for everything all the way through, but ultimately he's wrong footed and has to adjust to not always getting what he wants - at least, not right away. As you can imagine, Tennant plays this to perfection.

Everything the RSC does is very much an ensemble and it seemed to me that Tennant took a while to blend in with a company again, but he's got there now in a way he hadn't when I saw Hamlet.. Admittedly that was two months ago, and also LLL is more of an ensemble piece. I also thought he looked a good bit older and more tired than he does on TV. It must be quite a punishing schedule, particularly when it's two performances a day. I know it's the same for everyone but they're big parts and he has the fans at the stage door as well.

It's nice that he gets to use the Scottish accent. And there's a lot of climbing and jumping out of trees, and somehow his clothes always end up a little rumpled, not that I'm complaining, of course...

I mentioned a few days ago that I was off to the Cheltenham Lit Fest to hear RTD and John Barrowman. In fact, there's rather more to the trip than a bit of fangirling.

I've been thinking of returning to some kind of postgraduate study for a good few years now. It's a bit of a daunting prospect since I graduated back in 1981 and haven't done much in the way of formal learning since. I'm the kind of person who gets wild notions and then they tend to wear themselves out and I move on. However, there is something seriously like a plan coalescing now in my mind.

I'm an English grad, and like many Eng Lit grads I was overexposed to Shakespeare in my teens and twenties, and eventually reacted against it. That began to shift after I saw "The Shakespeare Code" and it led to visiting the Globe last summer for a performance of Love's Labour's Lost. I found it thrilling to see a Shakespeare play in its contemporary staging and it fired me up to start reading about The Bard again. James Shapiro's book "1599" riveted me with its lively portrait of that particular year of Shakespeare's life (the one where he probably wrote "Hamlet" in fact) in its political context.

Then, around 4 weeks ago, came Stratford and "Hamlet". I was indeed riveted by DT's performance, that's why I went. More surprisingly, I felt I'd come back to my spiritual and intellectual home. I realised how much of my life and my creativity has been shaped by an abiding love of Shakespeare's work and it was very, very hard to leave. I'd gone because I love an actor. I left loving a town.

And suddenly the penny dropped. I want to study Shakespeare. So I looked at courses and discovered The Shakespeare Institute, affiliated to the University of Birmingham, and their wonderful collection of MA courses. They offer part-time and full-time options and they are based in Stratford.

This is what I want to do. Since then, I've enrolled on a course in Restoration Drama at Manchester Uni, where I'll be studying "Hamlet" and three contemporary plays in depth, plus a day school in "Macbeth and Richard II - the Politics of Power". I've been out of study for so long, I need to build up to it again.

When I booked the Cheltenham Lit Fest gig, I realised I'd be geographically close to Stratford so it would be fun to see if I can pick up a return ticket for Love's Labour's Lost. What took rather more courage was to approach the Institute and ask if I might visit. Anyway, it now looks as though I'll be dropping in on one of their seminars and talking informally to them on 10th October.

I feel like a new chapter in my life is beginning and I can't deny I'm rather excited. And in some ways, I have David Tennant to thank for it, because it started with "TSC".

I'll let you all know how I get on.

http://www.shakespeare.bham.ac.uk/postgrad/