Yes! You are privileged to behold that most wondrous of sights, a World Premiere! And you thought it was only flash bastards like Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, and, oh, whassisname, the sad git who's with the Moonies, no the Mormons, oh no, that's Cat Stevens, no, I mean the one set up by L. Ron Cupboard, you know, the church of christ Scientologist, the short one, Tom Cruiser. Yes, that's him. Where was I? That's right, start again. But No! You too can witness a World Premiere! In the privacy of your own bedroom! With only your Spice Girls poster looking on! Actually, the Spice Girls poster makes it even more lifelike, all those glamorous women. Well, those cheap tarts more like. Still, a cheap tart is as good as a glamorous woman in my book. Or rather, it's the closest I ever get. Well, actually, I met a cheap tart once ....
But I digress, the excitement is making me go all weak at the knees. As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, it's a bona fide, genuine, authentic, straight up World Premiere! Are you disillusioned with Java? Sick and tired of hearing about how great Java is going to be, the best thing since sliced Fortran, yet all you get to see are cheap animated images, not unlike the rather naff gif shown above? Tired of playing yet another ill-functioning game of Noughts and Crosses? Well, so were we. But we didn't just turn off our computers and watch that Kylie video, you know, the one where she takes her kit off in that spacecraft. No, we decided to strike back! We decided that we could do something to take Java into a New Era of Naffness! So we came up with the following adaptation of one of the Greatest Works of World Literature, and Javafied it. (Actually all we did was nick a bit of code from Herb Jellinek (a bloke who works for Sun) and add some gifs).
We decided upon Waiting for Godot because it seemed to us to be just about the saddest play you can imagine. And we don't mean emotionally wrenching, we mean plain old pathetic. Two blokes with nothing better to do than sit about waiting for some mysterious tosspot to wrench himself away from the Topless Darts on Sky and trundle down to meet them, only he just got these great Swedish videos off of a mate of his, under the counter, and red hot, full-on. So he sits down to watch them instead. And all the time good old Estragon and Vladimir sit about playing cards and discussing who they would shag if they were marooned on a desert island with Sinead O' Connor and Whitney Houston (quite a dilemma, I mean, who would you most like to shut up), and who their favourite Spice Girl is.
Of course, for a big event like this we needed some pretty big name stars to play our leading roles. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are proud to present:
Eric
Cantona, as Estragon
Roger
Moore, as VladimirThe Sad Theatre Productions production of Waiting for Godot comes in two versions. First, the genuine JavaPlay version. A word of warning, however. Because Java is still in its very early stages of development (i.e. crap), this might be a little dodgy. We took a simple applet and stuck 260 images in it, so it might well fall over. We tried it out on a P166+ with 16 Meg of RAM, and it still drops frames from time to time. Still, what do you expect, we are running Win95, (Crunch! There goes one huge chunk of memory! Thanks Mr Gates!), Netscape Navigator (Crunch! And another!), and the Java runtime environment (Crunch!), so I would recommend trying it with a P200, 64 Meg of RAM and a T1 connection. To make up for these shortcomings, we also produced a plain ordinary HTML version, for mere mortals running low-end equipment, such as a P133. We might even turn out an animated gif version, if we can be arsed. So, our advice is, fire up the JavaPlay version, just so you can say you were there, then check out the HTML version, so you can actually follow the play.
Happy Viewing!