A first date

[adifferentlife]

Dating is something that Sybil finds a bit strange. It isn't that she's doing anything she wouldn't have were she home at Downtown - the theatre with a suitor wouldn't be something that raised a brow, though dinner somewhere public would be considered odd to say the least. What is the strangest is doing it herself, organising this all with someone who doesn't know her family. Organising it with someone so much like her and yet so different.

The play had been one they both should have known. After all it was Shakespeare, and Hamlet - whilst not romantic - was something that she has enjoyed in the past. Tonight's performance left her baffled, with more questions than anything. But other than a shared baffling, she keeps her thoughts to herself until they're seated at the restaurant. Only then does she look across the table with her eyes wide, shaking her head. "Were they all supposed to be derelicts?"

Comments

[jaimemieux]

Seeing Shakespeare in Paris had always been an exotic event for a young man in Restoration France. The actors were often foreign, the language required that even those with a good grasp of English follow carefully, and the performances usually had an intensity rarely seen in domestic productions. An evening of Shakespeare meant something altogether different than one spent at the Comedie-Francaise - and that was what Combeferre had liked about it.

All of which was to say that he had expected something unusual.

But perhaps not quite that unusual. The Prince of Denmark in rags, a literal madman? Was it only Combeferre's relative unfamiliarity with a variety of productions - his Frenchness - that made it seem so strange? He had been half afraid to comment, as though doing so might reveal something about himself that he would rather not. And so when Sybil spoke, he almost laughed with relief. "You found it baffling as well? Oh, thank goodness. That was... quite unexpected."