ABSTRACT
A lute rendering of 'Walsingham' plays as ambient mood music; we are presented with a screen, close-up to the front of the stage, onto which is projected an indigo, fluid patterning, damasked, somehow Moorish; the lute may begin to sound like an oud, its middle-eastern relative. The miseen-scene also suggests an Islamic grace in the framing of Ophelia by a central vertical rectangle, hinting at retired seclusion and the modesty conventions of pre-modem societies. We only see Ophelia indistinctly through a lace veil which is stretched across this aperture as she reflectively addresses her mirror, the dubious double-emblem of vain folly and/or self-knowledge. The lace membrane is not perfect, but broken by three mandorla-shaped piercings; we seem to see the actor through a lattice, like one of the filigree wooden screens enclosing balconies in some traditional middle-eastern houses, an image of seclusion, the female withdrawn from the early-modem social world, but able to look over the street below. The scene is a wordless tableau, intensely moving in its pathos: Ophelia's naked torso is patterned by the projected shadows of the modesty veil, as if she is comprehensively damasked. But there is an anomaly; her upper chest has the mass and shape of a well built, fleshy male, and more than this, s/he sports a neo-Jacobean moustache and goatee beard.
