Your Dream Notes refers. Rude Mechanicals are NOT Strolling Players! Travelling Players, trained performers, passed their delicate craft down generations. Like Andre Huguenot, true South African hero, travelling players lived awful, bleak itinerant lives, never knowing where they would sleep forced by two-faced society into lives of prostitution, disease, cold and hunger. They were, however, the finest actors in the world, because merely to exist they never stopped rehearsing, improvising and performing. Without these dedicated, focused performers a la Hamlet’s players, performance art would have died centuries back.

The Rude Mechanicals (“rough workmen:” to those with less understanding than I am blessed to have) are AmDrams: dilettantes, fun-seeking noisebags who use the Drama as escapism. Knowing the text. God forbid, correct cues, entrances and exits, are not priorities. Waving to audience, inability to comprehend or process director’s notes, late or non arrival, these are the true traits of the average AmDram. Another quality, which I personally am happy to own: none of the above stygmae belonged to me before I won my first Vita! These people Shakespeare gently mocks with his wonderful Mechanicals.

Also, I was devastated and hurt, Carrie, that YOU did not see the talent, comic genius and sensitivity of Durban’s finest actor. Rory Booth, undoubtably the funniest and most innovative Bottom since Burbage. Please publish this reply on your esteemed site. – Garth Anderson