Performances

With all this sport about, you may be thinking that I have been neglecting my cultural attendances. You would be wrong - I just haven’t had time to tell you about the recent ones. So here’s a round up:

HITCHCOCK'S 'THE LODGER'

The British Film Institute has been working hard, and its archivists have recently restored this early (1927) Hitchcock silent movie, about a landlady who suspects her lodger of being a dastardly criminal. The Barbican gave it a wonderful showing, complete with live soundtrack performed by none other than the London Symphony Orchestra. The score was a brand new one, composed by Indian-British composer Nitin Sawhney. With the suitable silent-movie-hero-looking Ivor Novello on the grainy black-and-white screen, the London fog, the ditzy blond, and the LSO in full film-music flight, this was fabulous.

******

YES, PRIME MINISTER

I expect you’ve heard of the television program of this name, and you may also know that it has transmorgified into a stage show, written by the same writers, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn.

The production is playing at the New Trafalgar Theatre, a small venue, where the stage set represents the study at Chequers. The Prime Minister is dealing with a crisis, and with Sir Humphrey, and the redoubtable Bernard is beside him. There is also a new character, a political aide named Claire. At first it is hard to forget the memorable actors who created the original TV characters - quite a task for the stage actors, to make us forget. But by the second half, I’d become absorbed in the shenanigans and had mentally embraced, so to speak, the new actors. Bernard was the best - thanks, Clive Hayward.

******

RICHARD III

The evil King was on at Shakespeare’s Globe, so of course it rained on the yardlings, someone fainted, and our seats were of Elizabethan uncomfortableness. But the sublime Mark Rylance was in the title role, so from the very first line -- “Now is the winter of our discontent...” -- the rain and the seats were completely forgotten in absorption with the stage. As is usual at The Globe, we had the accompaniment of minstrels; and for this play we also had the female roles played by young men. It was all quite fabulous - I think that will suffice for my review. You can read another here.

But let me just say that Rylance’s Richard had some unusual features. Often, the audience laughed at him - this is, to say the least, unusual for the king who famously murdered the two boy princes in the Tower (according to Shakespeare, anyway), as well as numerous other people who stood between him and his throne. The reviewers have not known what to make of this, one suggesting that the director should do something to eliminate the phenomena; and another comparing the characterisation to Tony Blair - a jolly fellow who goes on to do great evil (!!) It puzzled me a bit; but I did think that Rylance made Richard III very human, and very clever. Perhaps not creepy enough. But “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” was utterly believable, and you kinda wanted someone to find him a horse, despite his evil deeds. The jury’s out.

Later, I read that Rylance had suffered a bereavement in his family just a few weeks before, but had decided to go on with his Globe season (though he pulled out of the Olympics Opening Ceremony). Very poignant. Thank you, Mr Rylance.

******

PORGY & BESS

At the Coliseum, home of the ENO, the visiting Cape Town Opera Company put on a quite fabulous evening. The all-black South African cast playing the moving “Porgy & Bess” gave it a new frisson. It was not possible to dismiss the tableau of poor black waterfront folk as a history piece from Gershwin’s 1940s - the South Africans reminded us that there are plenty of communities like this today.

Gershwin’s music is so lovely, and the cast sang magnificently. “Summertime”, “I Loves You Porgy” -- the favourites were all there. Our Porgy (Xolela Sixaba) had a huge, beautiful rich bass voice; and the voice of his Bess (Nonhlanhla Yende) was big enough to match him. The supporting cast and the chorus were all exemplary. I shed a tear - always a sign of a good night at the opera. 

I loves you, Porgy.

******

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

This has to be one of my favourite Shakespearean comedies, about two sets of twins separated at birth and then reunited in an hilarious confusion of mistaken identity. As the Royal Shakespeare Company's site puts it, "In a town the size of Ephesus, events like these can only lead to confusion." My favourite line in the whole play is when Adriana, wife of one of the twins who enjoyed a steamy evening with the man she thought was her husband, learns that there's an identical twin. She interrupts the reunification to ask: "Which of you two did dine with me today?" 

The very good cast of the RSC at Stratford-Upon-Avon is listed here.

******

Desdemona

Anja Harteros as Desdemona

Actually, Verdi’s opera is called “Otello”, and Shakespeare’s play upon which is it based is - as we al know - “Othello”. But Anja Harteros’ Desdemona at Covent Garden was so beautiful and believable that she made the story hers. Not that Otello (Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko) wasn’t magnificently tortured, and Iago (Italian baritone Lucio Gallo) wasn’t slimily evil, but I have always found the character of Desdemona to be rather insipid and unlikely. Not this one - she was tall, regal, intelligent, and fought hard for her life. And there was also plenty of psychological believability in her falling in love with Otello in the first place. Not only that, but she sang the “Willow Song” so wonderfully..

Iago commences his dirty work.

...but I also have to admit that the scene that really brought  tear to my eye was Otello’s death. Opera singers these days are such consummate actors. This version of the opera was a revival of a 1987 Elijah Moshinsky production - gorgeous set design by Timothy O’Brien -  and Moshinsky himself is directing the revival. It is beautiful, lush, set in the period of the Venetian Republic’s heyday, and does wonderful justice to Verdi’s sumptuous choruses and big dramatic vision.

The storm at sea with which the story opens is brought to life by lightening, crashing sound, a huge cannon and a siege machine filling the stage - along with about fifty people singing at the top of their lungs. The program tells us that there is 3-metre metal “thundersheet” hanging from a wall at the side of the stage, a wind machine, and a bass drum to create the storm’s Noises Off. At other points there are four separate bits of orchestra (mainly trumpets) playing from the wings or up in the flies. There is also a large bell - the Royal Opera owns a number of large church bells, which are as old as the theatre itself. The one used in ‘Otello’ is struck with a leather mallet. Apparently if you hit metal against metal you get shards and sparks. The player of the bell, which has to be hit very hard, wears airport-grade hearing protection. 

Huge opening.

The climax of the storm if the entry of Otello himself, a big tenor voice singing his lungs out form the very beginning, and continuing to do so until the very end, when he realises how he’s been taken in by the evil Iago, and has murdered his wife unjustly. But there is a lot of subtlety in “Othello” - it is, after all the work of the Master. It is a very deep and layered examination of psychological truths. A Moor, once a slave, rises to be a trusted commander in a foreign army, and marries (clandestinely) a Venetian aristocrat’s daughter? He seems to quickly believe the worst of her...but there is a suggestion that he doesn’t really think he ‘deserves’ her, or that he is living a dream. At the end of their great love duet in Act I, it occurs to him that he should just die now, since he has reached the pinnacle of possible happiness. 

It's not going well.

But there is not time here enough for a deep and meaningful discussion of “Othello”, or Shakespeare’s very modern-seeming takes on questions of race, anti-semitism and colonialism - how is it that Shakespeare seems so modern? It is claimed that half the children in the world today will study Shakespeare in their schoolwork. 

Meanwhile, back in the opera house, the Italian Verdi’s take on the tragedy of Othello and Desdemona is bringing a tear to quite a few eyes. 

Here's a review.

Official pictures.

Images from:

http://www.buzzbox.com/ws?u=www.telegraph.co.uk&id=967

http://onestoparts.com/review-roh-moshinsky-otello-2012

http://intermezzo.typepad.com/intermezzo/2012/07/royal-opera-house-otello-in-photos.html

Farewell to the Theatre

Gasp! No more theatre for your blogger? Calm down - that’s not what the title means. It is, rather, the name of a play I went to see at Hampstead Theatre recently. This was a ‘new’ theatre for me, and a very nice little space it is too - only one tube stop from St Johns Wood, or a short bus ride. There has been a theatre on this site for many years, but the building is recent. Every suburb has its theatre in London - a bit like Chinese restaurants in Australian towns.

Hampstead Theatre

But back to the play, which is by Richard Nelson (an American who has worked extensively in the Uk and the USA), and is about an actor, dramatist and  theatre director named Harley Granville Barker (1877 - 1946). The information below comes from the program, and an article in it written by David Jones. 

The name wasn’t familiar to me, and you too may be as ignorant as I. So here’s a quick potted bio:  Barker was an acclaimed actor in his youth, performing many leading roles for George Bernard Shaw. However, he regarded acting as merely the door by which he entered the theatre, and soon he couldn’t be persuaded to take on any more roles. He wrote a number of plays described as “urbane, intelligent, detailed and leisurely in their pace”. The fame of his writing suffered from being in the shadow of Shaw - they’ve been described as ‘Shaw-and-water’. But it was as a director that Barker seems to have more or less single-handedly dragged the theatre from the excesses of Victorian times into the modern-day theatre we recognise. 

The Victorian culture was one where star actors looked after their own parts, “thank you very much”. Barker was probably the first genuine director in British theatre, suggesting that actors could and should discuss and explore their parts. He insisted that “the text is worth trusting” and that the piece should have an overall cohesiveness imposed by one mind. His background as an actor helped him have a deep understanding of how actors work. 

His biggest innovations were in Shakespeare:

What he did was very simple: he restored the text, whittled away by centuries of actor-managers trying to highlight their parts. He threw out cumbersome scenery that had been slowing the plays to a standstill since the 18th century. He restored the apron stage, and direct contact between actors and audience. He re-established the fluid, continuous action essential to the narrative. he developed a fast, light style of verse-speaking whose rapidity left his first audiences gasping. And seeing the play as a while, as he did with his modern productions, he succeeded in bringing Shakespeare into the twentieth century.

But what of the play? It takes a specific moment in the life of Barker, as WWI is breaking out. He is at a small college int he USA, his first marriage is on the rocks, the college is producing a play that night...the themes are about alienation - from country, from personal relationships, and, well, from the theatre. The production was beautifully designed - one of the loveliest, low-key but effective, sets I’ve seen (designer: Hildegard Bechtler). The characters were beautifully drawn and the piece was engrossing. Ben Chaplin played Harley Granville-Barker. Roger Michell directed.

Ben Chaplin and Tara Fitzgerald (Harley and Beatrice)

But let me leave you with the comments of the writer, Richard Nelson, on theatre itself:

Looking at theatre is not an introspective exercise I think; because theatre’s place in the world, it’s place in society, is neither introspective nor solipsistic. Theatre is very important to the history of man, and to man’s future. As Harley says in the play, it is the only artistic art form that uses the entire live human being as its expression. By that I think he means that theatre is a totally and profoundly human art form. It is live human being relating to live human being in the same room. The same space. And because of this very elemental nature of theatre, it carries with it, I believe, a world view, and that view is humanistic. 

Here's a review.


Images from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/08/farewell-to-the-theatre-review
http://modernarchitecturelondon.com/pages/hampstead-theatre.php
http://www.faber.co.uk/work/farewell-to-theatre/9780571280735/

Shakespeare

Welcome to the 15th century

I find I cannot leave the subject of Shakespeare just yet. I have lots more to tell you. Not about another play - the season at The Globe Theatre on London’s Southbank is in full swing, but tickets to the plays are booked out months in advance.The Globe Theatre is a faithful reconstruction of the open-air playhouse, first built in 1599, where Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote many of his greatest plays. Each year over 350,000 members of the audience experience the 'wooden O' sitting in a gallery or standing as a groundling in the yard, just as they would have done 400 years ago. Since it is in part open to the elements, The Globe’s season runs from April to October. 

The Globe Theatre

As we all know....Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in The Cotswolds. He lived 1564 to 1616, dying at 52 years old. In Stratford one can (and many do) visit Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, the farmhouse where Shakespeare’s wife lived with her family, and where he is said to have wooed her. They have a wooden bench by a settle, where the bard’s bum is supposed to have rested. One former owner spread this about in order to make a fine profit from selling off bits of the bench, rather like religious relics. The Cottage is very interesting to visit as an example of a prosperous 16th century farmhouse. Whether Shakespeare and Anne ever sat on the famous bench, when he was 18 (and she 26) they “had to” get married because she was pregnant. They had three children eventually, Susanna, and twins named Hamnet (who died) and Judith.  

The ridiculously picturesque Anne Hathaway's Cottage

Shakespeare's House, Stratford-upon-Avon

The house in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare was born and lived his early married life can be visited also, and again is very evocative and well-presented. It fronts a busy shopping street in the town, and has been “enhanced” by an audio-visual experience ‘spectacular’ to which all visitors are treated before emerging gratefully into the calm of a recreated Tudor garden, tastefully adorned with people in period costume playing lutes and so on.  The audio-visual thingy features some Shakesperean artifacts, like the very stone base of a town monument next to which Shakespeare’s father would once probably have stood to sell gloves. the most interesting one was a copy of the First Folio - there’s another in The British Library, which dedicates its “Treasures Room” to the foresighted individuals who gathered together all the known copies of Shakespeare’s plays into this volume several years after his death. It is the First Folio that provides our best record of Shakespeare’s plays. (The British Library also has lots of the so-called “quarto” versions of individual plays as well - it is amazing how much of Shakespeare’s work survives).

Title page of the First Folio

Stratford-upon-Avon has preserved a number of Shakesperean sites, which you can read about here. On the subject of his birthplace, they say:

Shakespeare's Birthplace has been welcoming visitors for over 250 years. William Shakespeare grew up here and he played here. He ate meals in the hall and he slept and dreamed in these rooms. Shakespeare also spent the first five years of married life in this house with his new wife, Anne Hathaway.

For millions of Shakespeare enthusiasts worldwide, the house is a shrine. You will discover the world that shaped the man and you'll find out what other famous writers thought when they visited here. Well-known visitors have included Charles Dickens, John Keats, Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy.

Coming over all Elizabethan at Shakespeare's House in Stratford

There is a period of Shakespeare’s life about which very little is known, but sometime or other he left Stratford - possibly to earn his keep - and moved to London. Anne and the children stayed behind. He possibly worked as an actor - he seems to have had lots of actors friends - and by 1592 he was starting to make his mark as a playwright. By this time he had probably completed his “Wars of the Roses” tetralogy (which ends with “Richard III”). he managed to avoid catching the plague in 1592, luckily (*with great understatement*) The Globe Theatre opened in 1599, and from then on most of Shakespeare’s new plays were performed there. he was particular friends with the actor Richard Burbage, for whom he may have intended many of his leading roles.

View from Anne Hathaway's Cottage

Hamlet was written in 1600-01, and the darker tragedies followed: Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. His father died in 1601 - there is some evidence that Shakespeare travelled regularly back to Stratford - he invested n property there -  but there is precious little to go on for those wanting detail of his private life. It is thought that he and Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright, engaged in “wit-combats” in London taverns. “The Tempest” , 1611, is thought to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote on his own (there were some later collaborations with John Fletcher). In 1613 The Globe burnt down. It was rebuilt, but Shakespeare moved back to Stratford. he saw both his daughters married and his first grandchild born. He died rather suddenly, put down to an attack of pneumonia. He was buried beneath the floor of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, where he had been baptized.

He was a man, take him for all in all/I shall not look upon his like again....Hamlet, 1.2

Spotted in Moreton-in-Marsh

The Cotswolds makes the most of its famous son.

On a Shakespeare kick

beg, buy or steal....

With my visit to Stratford-upon-Avon and that wonderful RSC production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in my mind, I returned to London to seek out more Shakespeare. As luck would have it, I had prudently pre-booked a ticket to one of the hottest shows in town at the moment, Kevin Spacey in ‘Richard III” at The Old Vic. 

My little helper

For someone who has forgotten most of their Shakespeare (except ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and chunks of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’) I recognised that this one would be more of a challenge - the history plays can get so complicated. But no worries! In one of the Stratford bookshops I had purchased a helpful volume entitled “Essential Shakespeare Handbook” and in it I found a summary of the plot, sorting out the Tudors from the Plantagenets, Buckingham from the Hastings, and who is a widow of whom. Understanding the the complicated family trees is not made any easier by so many people having the same christian names....as Lady Margaret says to the other two ‘weeping widows’: 
“I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;/I had a harry, till a Richard killed him:/ Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;/Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him...”

With the help of this useful background reading, and a very clear production (Sam Mendes directing, Stephen Lee Andersen set design) I was able to follow just about al of the plot twists and turns, and appreciate the splendid characterisations by the actors. Spacey (now Artistic Director of The Old Vic) was (in my humble opinion) quite brilliant at Richard. There are - obviously - quite a few challenges with this dark character. He does quite evil things (those princes in the Tower!), yet there is a dark psychological side to do with his crippleness and self-loathing. Spacey, playing with one leg twisted round in a caliper and a hunch in his back, even made Richard believable in seducing Lady Anne as she mourns he husband and father-in-law, whom he has just had killed. As Shakespeare himself puts it, “Was ever woman in this humour wooed?/Was ever woman in this humour won?” Yep - believably done, believe it or not. (Lady Anne is played by Annabel Scholey).

Richard "wooing" Lady Anne.

The production is part of something called The Bridge Project, which meant that (in a reversal of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, where English actors assumed American accents), many of the actors were American. Although they didn’t bother impersonating English accents. The staging was somewhere, sometime with a contemporary feel and more than a nod to current  cruel political dictators (the program has pictures of Mubarak, Gaddafi and Kim Il-Jong). The point of The Bridge Project is trans-Atlantic co-productions, and they take the shows on tour. This one is off to the European continent once it’s finished it’s London run.

Spacey's Richard III

Of the roles other than the marvellous and dominating lead, the women were strongest. The haunting Lady Margaret (Gemma Jones), going on and on about all her relatives that Richard had killed, was saved from tediousness by a very touching delivery. I found her an absorbing character. The imperious Queen Elizabeth (Haydn Gwynne) - the mother of the Tower princes and various other relatives despatched by Richard - was particularly good int he scene where he tries to convince her that he can marry her daughter (he has, by this time, despatched the sad Lady Anne).

I thought a couple of the pivotal male roles were a bit weak, including the Duke of Buckingham (who was an African-American in a brown lounge suit, American-accented). He is a toadying sycophant who turns traitor, a strong role that didn’t really resonate. Although there is a marvellous scene where Richard is relayed on film, Buckingham is at a microphone, and "the media" is clearly being used to sell Richard's "spin" to the citizenry - clever, very clever. Henry of Richmond - who defeated Richard on Bosworth field and became Henry VII - wore a spiffing red coat but was wooden. There’s a scene where the ghosts of those Richard has killed line up and accuse him (and praise Henry) which was well done, with them all ranged along a long table. And the battlefield climax also came off highly dramatically: “A Horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

Spacey & Mendes

An interesting bit of background I came across: Shakespeare was writing at a time when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, and without heirs. The Tudor line established by Henry VII was thus under threat, and from a public relations point of view the Tudors were keen to blacken the name of Richard III (if it needed any more blackening) to discourage any Lancastrian pretenders. Since the Queen’s forebear had seized the crown by force of arms, his reputation needed some spiffing up too. As my “Essential Shakespeare Handbook” puts it:

"Shakespeare went beyond Tudor propaganda by presenting a Richard who is as seductive and intelligent as he is violent and evil. In the process he created one of the finest villains of the English theatre....To this day it is the actor’s performance which determines whether the play is a terrifying melodrama or a black comedy....”

Kevin Spacey’s interpretation has elements of both, but is in the end a modern psychological interpretation. His Richard III is not without some black humour, and certainly with a great deal of humanity.
The Guardian review
BBC report
The Daily Mail  says Spacey's Richard suffers from "a surfeit of sarcasm and campness" Oooo!

"Now is the winter of our discontent/
Made glorious summer by this sun of York..."
Ah yes, just a bit of sarcasm.

The Merchant of Vegas

Stage view

Well that was absolutely fabulous. It is about time that I saw a performance of Shakespeare, here in the home of the Greatest Briton. How would the English do in performing The Bard...Their Bard? Answer: extraordinarily, amazingly well. For my first Shakespeare in England I came to Stratford-Upon-Avon, William S.’s original home, and to the RSC, the Royal Shakespeare Company, in their newly refurbished theatre on the banks of the Avon. All excellent decisions. This was Shakespeare done brilliantly: a re-imagined setting, brilliant acting, and an innate empathy for the language that could probably not be equalled by anyone else anywhere else.

Jamie Beamish does Elvis. It worked, it really did.

The play? “The Merchant of Venice”. The re-imagining? Las Vegas - gambling and risk-taking and money-grubbing: geddit? It worked very well as a re-setting, even the opening with the Elvis-impersonator and his rendition of “Viva Las Vegas.” Shylock was played by Patrick Stewart, who began with the RSC in 1966 and has been playing Shakespearean roles more or less ever since. He was, if you will excuse the expression, bloody good. Portia was also brilliant: Susannah Fielding in her RSC debut. A better couple of leads you couldn’t hope for, and the rest of the big cast generally exemplary too.

One of the side-products of choosing to set the play in Las Vegas is that everyone adopted American accents (and the debt of three thousand ducats became three million dollars). Some accents were pure Brooklyn (and very good too), others - like Portia and her maid Nerrisa (Emily Plumtree) - were broad Southern. The ladies of Belmont were overseeing the stream of beaus coming to court Portia - you may recall (I didn’t - I’d forgotten most of the play) that to win the fair Portia a beau had to choose the correct casket from amongst a choice of three: lead, silver or gold. This was presented as a TV game show: “DESTINY”, as in..."the lottery of my destiny".

So funny.

Nerrisa and Portia. Truly.

Back in Venice, the Strip replaced the Rialto, but the gossip and the news and the characters worked the same. In fact, I found that having forgotten the details of the story was a great thing, because there I was watching that big dramatic moment where Shylock begins to carve his “pound of flesh” from the unfortunate merchant Antonio (who never should have made such a stupid bargain in the first place, one always feels), thinking “surely he doesn’t do it” but not being able to remember the denouement....When Portia, disguised as a judge, pipes up and says....but perhaps you have forgotten too, or haven't read or seen the play, so....  


One perhaps unusual aspect was the prominence given to the faintly (or here, not so faintly) expressed homosexual vibe between Antonio and Bassanio. Since Bassanio has just married Portia, and she has just performed heroics to save Antonio, only to realise....well, she's left as rather a tragic figure.

Patrick Stewart as Shylock

The question of anti-Semitism is confronted head-on and unflinchingly in this production, as indeed it is in the play. A very interesting article in the program says that in 1594, just about the time that Shakespeare was writing his play, the Earl of Essex had orchestrated a trumped-up conviction (for poisoning) and execution of Queen Elizabeth I’s personal physician Roderigo Lopez - who happened to be a Jew. Marlowe’s play “The Jew of Malta” was revived, under Essex’s sponsorship. It seems that Shakespeare sensed a box office opportunity. However it must be said that in “The Merchant of Venice” neither the Jews nor the Christians come out of it very well. The Christians persecute and discriminate, and there is that moving speech by Shylock “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” But Shylock himself is far from sympathetic, being willing to commit murder for revenge and apparently not having a merciful bone in his body, even remaining hard-hearted in the face of Portia’s speech about “the quality of mercy is not strained...”


Here's one review, and here's another.

The newly renovated RSC Theatre

The newly re-vamped RSC theatre is a great space. I never saw it in its old version, before the four-year renovation. The interior still retains the feel of an old-fashioned horse-shoe shaped theatre with the stage at ground level and the seats rising up around. Lots of the old features - timber and brickwork - have been retained and incorporated into the current building. Indeed some Art Deco facades and the Edwardian 600 seat Swan Theatre to the rear of the main stage were required to remain untouched. The main theatre holds 1040 - and was full on the night of my visit. I scored a wonderful Circle seat directly in front of the stage on a last minute deal. The set used a staircase - works a treat when the audience is mostly higher than the players. There were no less than eight entrance/exits, plus a trap door, which verged on overkill. The play sometimes took on the air of farce, with characters dashing in and out and off and on with precision timing. We also enjoyed a live band (screened from view by an opaque backdrop), for those big Elvis and showgirl numbers. In the second half we had a little Roy Orbison as well. All power to cast member Jamie Beamish, playing the character Launcelot Gobbo, servant to Shylock, who did double-duty as the all-singing-all-dancing showman. 

Stratford-Upon Avon

P.S. recounting the play to a friend the next day - a handsome black Londoner - his first question was "who played the Prince of Morocco?" (Answer: Chris Jarman). "I LOVE that speech", said my friend, and began it..."Mislike me not for my complexion, The shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun...." The Prince of Morocco, having chosen the wrong casket, also gets that well-known speech beginning "All that glisters is not gold..."

Upon the Avon....

Pre-theatre I enjoyed a set menu-type meal, but of a rather superior kind, at the Rooftop Restaurant; a trip up to the top of the new tower (8 stories, lovely views across Stratford-Upon-Avon, no purpose other than to just be a tower); and a walk along the banks of the Avon to watch the swans, the barges and the rowers in the early evening. Apres-theatre I drove back about 20 kms to my digs in the pub at Moreton-In-Marsh (sounds soggy but was very Cotswolds-picturesque. The only hitch was that the GPS had a senior moment and not only led me confidently into the heart of the completely wrong village, but also sent me down a narrow steep lane that ended in a ditch. Out of which I had to reverse uphill in the dark, narrowly avoiding stone walls and the parked cars of the unsuspecting residents. I drove carefully in the dark, because earlier that evening I had stopped behind a truck which had just hit a deer, which made very messy roadkill. I finally found dear little Moreton-In-Marsh, where the pub awaited with its doors firmly locked up for the night. Rapping on the windows of the snug (as they call the bar) roused a night-watchman-type person, thank goodness. And so I am here to tell you the tale.

Just like Wm. Shakespeare, if not as literary.

The Bard.