h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

.. I noticed that basic knowledge of old Dutch and English makes parts of the Anglo-Saxon almost understandable .. well.. I can explain the translations sometimes

Yes ...I'm glad you said about Dutch and English..I was watching some of the TV animated Chaucer tales a while back and thought some of it really sounded like Dutch!

some of the words are very much like Dutch .. when seeing both original and modern translations I can indeed recognise a lot of Chaucer.. when I only see the original language: blank!

I really like Gawain and the Green Knight...had a very small part in a college production of it many moons ago...the most fiendishly difficult show to stage, not least because of the giant knight's starring role

Night ..welterusten Happy May Day !

.. May day .. well, obviously on the 1st of May I .. w*rk

Gawain .. .. stage it ? well.. two choices really; Gawain is a small kid and the knight is regular or the knight is an enormous guy.. .. and then there's the language issue ..

Hope it went well anyway, w*rking or not...
Well the production we did had a 'modern' English translation by one of the drama lecturers (not so poetic but perfectly understandable) and a Green Knight with a kind of Rio carnival-style giant papier mache head and shoulders on top of a normal-sized actor, on short stilts..All went well in the dress rehearsal (never a good sign) but on the first (k)night the Knight misjudged the head-room available going on stage and quite lost his head

well, modern English is one thing, letting the Green Knight lose his head this way is .. fascinating.. adds a lot to the story I'd say. As far as I remember Gawain was to chop the knight's head off?? But with an axe, not with a doorway slightly lower than expected?

Very true...but then drama isn't an exact..erm...science, is it? (I forgot to mention that in the same performance my tiny scene in which *all* I had to do was say a few lines and sweep the floor with a besom went awry as well...ah well, it keeps one humble)

sweep the floor? well, I don't remember all the details of the story but .. there probably were other roles in the play, more glamour.... then again .. depending on the age .. hmm..
but what more went wrong??

Well the bloke who put it all together made a lot of changes, and added a few minor characters to carry the narrative through the yawning gaps his editing had left So I was a gloomy housemaid (type casting ) grumbling about having too much work to do and making pronouncements of the 'no good will come of all this' variety...
Because it was such a small role I spent a lot of time brushing up my (terrible) chess game in the dressing-room with a fellow-student I liked albeit with a niggling thought to keep an eye on the clock...so when one of the stage-hands put his head round the door and shouted: "Quick! It's your scene!" I thought I should already be onstage, grabbed the broom and set off at a gallop.
The scene was due to start with me working from one side of the 'kitchen' to the other before anyone else appeared so when, from the wings, I saw the stage was empty and heard no dialogue I presumed it was my cue to sally forth, muttering and sweeping furiously as I went...
Unfortunately, the stage-hand, believing me to be rather slow on the uptake (where on earth did he get that idea?) had allowed for extra time, so I found myself in the middle of the action in the scene *before* mine: the empty stage and the pregnant pause, it rapidly turned out, merely presaged the return of several knights, still arguing in the (I think) banqueting hall. I don't know who was more to see who...
All might still have been well ( I just carried on sweeping around them) if a) one of them hadn't got hysterical giggles and b) a chunk of the hand-crafted besom hadn't become detached through frantic action and flown into the stalls.

well, that wasn't too .. weird?

* chess game in the dressing room * .. good place to do that

.. one scene too early did anyone notice? the audience almost certainly didn't ? well.. apart from the bits of the broom flying low and the giggles

Shakespear would be proud of you

I think both the giggles and the flying broom gave us away! (Perhap some of the audience were looking for the to go with it).. And the director certainly noticed and was very cross with me
But yes, I think I would have fitted very well into the general mayhem that must have been your average Shakespearean show, flying oranges and all...
And now whenever you read about the Fair Maid of Camelot

...whenever I read about the Fair Maid of Camelot I'll have visions of low flying brooms, giggling knights and muttering, grumbling housemaid ..

But then Camelot must have been something like that, don't you think? Far too genteel, most of the versions of early Britain we get handed down to us...Did you see the 'Knight's Tale' movie? Some fun moments in that - I enjoyed it a lot but some people who didn't appreciate the character of it thought it was sacrilegious to take such liberties...

.. well, the Camelot / Arthur stories were written several hundred years after Arthur .. and most were written by a Frenchman if I'm not mistaken. Reality probably had a lot to do with mud, sheep and all that .. sort of the Knight's Tale and a bit of Monty Python? the knights in shiny armour probably didn't exist until early 16th century? and the colourful Hollywood pictures.. well... Camelot probably had more "gloomy housemaids" than brave knights them throwing brooms in their audience is probably a new twist ..

Yes..imagine having to clean those draughty cob-webby castles...no wonder the maids were grumpy
Perhaps I've missed my vocation and should go into slapstick comedy or medieval re-enactment...or (on past evidence) some combination of the two...

grumpy maid throwing brooms to the audience .. chess with a knight in the dressing room .. well, with only a few tiny bits added this sounds like the start of a movie script? just add the bit where you come flying in, crashing a window, on your broom, sound of stuttering jet engine, crash landing, sound dies and you throw your brrrrrrooommmmm in the audience, disgusted. (what audience? well, the audience sitting in the big hall of course, what else would you fill up these castles with?) Add the grumpy text "no good will come from this".. mm??

what a good idea...will you write the screenplay?

that shouldn't be much of a problem .. I have most of Monty Pythons products as inspiration ..