The Professor paused for a second to sip his tea and continued,
“But the theatre is alive and well in the future, you understand, my dear boy.”
I scratched my left earlobe and wondered if, I too, would have white hair sprouting from my nose when I was an old man and, more importantly, if I would choose to do anything about it.
“Of course it’s changed and adapted, which is all to be expected. The theatre is an alive art form! We don’t have all the women’s parts played by young boys nowadays do we? Of course not, haha!”
I glanced at the Professor’s “time machine”. It looked suspiciously like a bicycle attached to a gong.
“So,” I said, “how has it changed, Professor?”
“Well, you see they no longer have one person playing a part. It’s quite refreshing really. The norm is to perform a play – Hamlet say or Oedipus Rex, those were the two I saw - where most of characters are played by ten or so people and the major characters by up to a hundred.”
“Really?” I replied.
“Yes and you see, the technical part is getting them all to move in the same way and say their lines at the same time. Naturally the stages are now huge things, quite a sight really.”
The Professor seemed to be in full steam now, I could almost hear his arms creaking as he gesticulated.
“But the real beauty is getting the emotional nuance of a scene across with a hundred voices going. That’s where the real skill lies. It’s really quite a sight, one hundred people delivering Hamlet’s famous soliloquy to one hundred Yoricks. It brought a tear to an old man’s eye I must confess.”
And with this he ran out of steam. Staring into his cup of tea he seemed lost in his own personal reverie.
I stretched my arms out and yawned. Mad as a box of toads the Professor, and I still had forty minutes left of my visit.