My weekend in Stratford and elsewhere
Jun. 18th, 2007 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanThis being a weekend largely devoted to theatre, I will begin with a lengthy ramble through what I got up to whilst away, followed by brief reviews of what I saw:
Having escaped work by the simple expedient of ignoring all emails and phone messages for 15 minutes then assuming I had nothing urgent to do, I left Cambridge under threat of rain, and equally dire threat of absence of train. The service I wanted couldn’t decide whether to be on time or cancelled – in the end it settled grumpily for a compromise of ten minutes late and on a different platform, and delivered me safely to Kings Cross, and the Tube (working smoothly for once) on to Marylebone.
Where, with perfect timing, I discovered that some dickwit had run his double-decker bus into a bridge at South Ruislip, and all services were currently suspended. By this point I was beginning to suspect my trip was cursed, and that the best thing I could do was go and hole up and get drunk somewhere – thankfully, the bus was dislodged with a drawn-out squeak, and train services resumed. Much to my surprise, the 14:54 to Stratford-upon-Avon, which one wouldn’t have pegged as one of the great arterial rail routes, was crammed to the doors – mostly with people going home to Beaconsfield, as it happens. Poor buggers.
Chiltern railways, which is to say everything going out of Marylebone, feels somewhat old-fashioned – even though the trains are new, the long stretches of country and windswept stations feel from a different age. This is probably not surprising, because the Chiltern network is basically two unexpected survivors of the Beeching cuts – the old back-route to Birmingham, and the stub of the Great Central. Probably the biggest population centre it serves which isn’t served quicker from another London terminus is Leamington Spa, which gives you an idea just what a throbbing throughway the main Chiltern line is.
After two and a half-hours of pootling through small towns and very English countryside (Warwickshire, after all, prides itself on being the Heart of England, for better or worse), I arrived in Stratford and set out for my home for the next two nights.
This proved to be a B&B of delirious excess. From the ersatz half-timbering to the embossed tiles up the path, and most particularly in the dozens of dolls covering every surface, this place was designed to make an impact. It did, too – I was bloody terrified, not least that when darkness fell there would be the clank of a thousand clockwork cogs meshing, and the whole house would come to life like some malign version of Coppelia.
My room, like most single rooms, was snug to the point of claustrophobia, up in the attic, with a sloping roof and a protruding beam on which I cracked my head within two minutes of arriving. Still, it had everything necessary for my purposes, and at £30 a night ensuite in a major tourist-trap, I could have done a lot worse.
Settled in, and trying to erase the image of being strangled my a kohl-eyed Victorian children’s doll from my mind, I wandered out into the town itself. Down Old Town to the Church, and up Southern lane to the theatres, I started to get fixed in my mind what the next two days would be like.
They would be like this: SHAKESPEARE. Just as you’re never more than eight feet from a rat, in Stratford you’re never more than six feet from a reference to the Bard, usually attached to something they want you to buy. My first serious brush with him was at Holy Trinity, where he is buried – fortunately, or unfortunately, the church was closed by then, so it was another thing to pack into Saturday.
Instead I went up to the Courtyard, the “temporary” 1000-seat theatre that the RSC have knocked up in an idle moment while they redesign the main house, and discovered that while there wasn’t a sniff of seats for King Lear the following night, they could get me into the Seagull that night, and that Stratford’s current big draw, Sir Ian “If You Mention Gandalf Once More…” McKellen was in it. Sold.
I had a wander round the rest of the town centre in the hour I had to kill, noting that the historic buildings had none of the continuity one sees in, say, Chester or Shrewsbury, but were scattered through the town like fruit in a plum pudding – and tat some of the more modern buildings would make for a very turgid suet indeed. Then it was back to the Courtyard, and marvelling at just what a fine job they had made of what is, when all’s said and done, a giant corrugated iron shed – three storeys of audience, a large thrust stage, and comfortable, well-spaced seating (well, unless you get a Falstaffian character sitting next to you, as I did). Something tells me that they won’t be packing it all away again the moment the new theatre is finished in 2010 – it’s altogether too good a space to lose.
The only other thing to note from the evening was the realisation that Stratford’s water defences were suffering a bit after the heavy rainfall of the past couple of days, and that the water meadows were aptly named, in that they were definitely more water than meadow. There were about five boats named after female Shakespeare characters, and I wondered if, given the speed and width of the river in flood, one could have a decent game of Pooh-stocks with them from Clopton Bridge. Maybe one day…
Saturday dawned overcast but mercifully dry, and after a deathly struggle with my own eyelids (deep sleep in cheap B&B’s is always something of a rarity), I inhaled a pleasingly passable breakfast, met some people from Mississippi (you’d never have guessed – they had opposable thumbs and everything), and set out to Do the Bard Thing.
I started back at Holy Trinity, with the grave – this is unostentatious to point of being completely self-effacing, and you only know what is written there from the piece of card with a reproduction. The bust above gives the standard view of Shakespeare as “Mr Thoughtful (With Quill Pan And Appalling Hairstyle)”, together with an inscription which I wouldn’t have been able to tread even if it hadn’t been in Latin. I was there good and early (before 9am), so I had the place comparatively to myself, apart from an Oriental woman kneeling in one of the choir stalls, who, as far as I could tell, took exactly the same picture at least 20 times. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she was a professional, rather than a complete fruit-loop, but in Stratford you can never be quite sure.
In fact, the church of Holy Trinity would be worth visiting even without its interesting heap of dust – it has a cracking set of Mediaeval misericords, and a sense of space befitting the church of a town already established 370 years when Shakespeare was born.
From the grave I travelled immediately back to the birthplace, which my Art Fund membership gets me into for free. This was probably just as well, because there isn’t a vast amount there for the standard £7 asking price. The exhibition on Shakespeare’s life is not bad, but suffers from the problem that anything on the Bard has – namely that there is almost no hard information about the bugger to be had. It probably couldn’t have been done any other way than it was, given the hordes it has to accommodate – a paragraph on lots of surrounding information, and quite a few reconstructions to peer at and buttons to press. Still and all, I don’t think it told me anything I didn’t already know, and I don’t count myself as any kind of authority on Shakespeare.
Beyond the exhibition, there is the birthplace itself, a well-preserved early 16th-century half-timbered house, which has been furnished with a reasonable stab at period pieces, though the effect is occasionally undone – the hanging in the children’s bedroom, for instance, looked absolutely terrifying. The guides also don’t have much to go on – because no matter how you slice up the experience, all we are talking about is a house where a baby was born. If you wanted a place which was central to Shakespeare’s particular genius, you would be far better off in the site of Stratford Grammar School, or the wharves of Southwark, than in Henley Street. In fact, the most interesting part of the display for me was not directly to do with Shakespeare, but rather with what had happened to the house – used as a pub and as a butcher’s shop at various times, it was displayed from the late eighteenth century by some distinctly eccentric private owners, and only narrowly avoided being dismantled and carted off to America by P T Barnum (who might have got a shock when he discovered that a major component of the fabric was cowshit). In the end I enjoyed visiting the house, and it’s something to tick off, but in the end it’s just a house, and no more interesting than any in Lavenham, or many another old English market town.
Speaking of “many another English market town”, Stratford, for all it tries to hide it, does suffer the same secret shame that many of our finest towns do – namely, truly appalling redevelopment in the 1960’s. In Stratford’s case, this is mainly found in a shopping centre called Town Square, which eats up a significant portion of the old town, and is of unparalleled hideousness. Tall concrete buildings with narrow walkways between them, it is claustrophobic, disorienting, and just downright unpleasant – a little flash of A Clockwork Orange in the middle of the tourist Mecca.
Having had my fill of all things Bardic for a while, I took![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xanna’s advice, and headed for the Butterfly Farm. This, despite my misgivings, proved to be an absolute winner. What has been done, basically is to create a small area of low-lying rainforest, with a temperature around 28 degrees, and humidity in the mid 90’s. They filled the space with trees, flowers, and a large pond with a waterfall, then released a couple of thousand butterflies into it, and left them to get on with it. the effects are spectacular – huge, gorgeously-coloured butterflies float around the place, settling on people, and brightening up the place immeasurably. Everywhere you look there is another beautiful specimen – quite a few get trodden on, alas, but as the main occupation of a butterfly is to make more butterflies, they’re not likely to run out any time soon. The place can be a bit creepy, of course, mainly because the predominant noise is of small children not coping with butterflies as well as their parents thought they would. To be fair, if you’re five years old and a bright blue thing twice the width of your hand settles on your arm, a bit of worry is not unreasonable.
And once the kiddies have got used to the butterflies, there’s plenty more to get them leaving puddles on the floor – through a door there is a room of Serious Insects (including a stag beetle that looked about the size of a can of Coke, and the glory that is the Giant Hissing Cockroach) and Equally Serious Lizards (I particularly liked Colin the Gecko). Then beyond that there’s the spiders and scorpions – I don’t care how many times people ell me that tarantulas are completely harmless, I can’t help the suspicion that that’s just what the tarantulas want us to think. And one of the scorpions was definitely trying to tunnel out of its enclosure…
After that display of nature red in tooth and claw, it was time to see mankind in the same state – an hour after escaping the butterflies, and after wringing myself out thoroughly (that level of humidity wears you out a lot more than you expect), I was settling in another theatre seat, this time in the Swan (the RSC’s second space, and really just a smaller version of the Courtyard), for Macbeth.
Reeling back into the sunshine after the play, I knew that it was time for the Great Lost Hope, and after grabbing some cash, made my way to the Courtyard, to queue for returns for Lear. Having accidentally joined the wrong end of the queue, and been subjected to the full morose force of a Leeds woman who made Eeyore look like Timmy Mallett, I joined the Queue of Doom – though there were only about 20 of us, the atmosphere was ridiculously funereal. There was a woman muttering feverishly to anyone who’d listen “I’m just going to pray”, and another on the verge of tears, telling us all how “this is the worst possible thing”. Theatre brings out the strangest in people, and also people who are pretty strange to start with, but I’d never seen anything like this. It was also funny to observe the four American teenagers, trying to remain cheerful in the face of so much concentrated English gloom, and not really succeeding.
The Yorkshire Weeper and her brow-beaten husband, who had allegedly been there since 10am (it was 5:30pm by this point), got in (to about the worst seats in the house), and the rest of the diehards stuck at it, but by 5:45, I and the woman I‘d got talking to decided we’d had enough (there were zero returns at that point), and walked back out into the sunshine, away from the enclave of doom. The experience had left me with two over-riding thoughts:
i) if you were that desperate, why in heaven’s name didn’t you get tickets when they were on sale?
ii) wonderful though seeing McKellen as Lear would definitely be, it is in the end a night at the theatre, not your only child’s inauguration as President.
Having failed to make it three plays in 24 hours (which may be just as well – you get into a strange mindset when you watch a lot of theatre in a short space of time, and it can be hard to stop), I stopped off to change clothes, and wandered out to Shottery, and another of the tourist trail stops I wasn’t going to make – Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Shottery is trembling on the edge of being a suburb of Stratford, but still just about manages to retain a village atmosphere, even if its pub looks anything but countrified. The Cottage itself is charming, as you would imagine – long and low, impeccably thatched, and set within a profusion of flowers, it looks every inch the romantic idyll. I didn’t feel especially broken-hearted to not be seeing inside it, but I’m glad I paid it a visit.
The evening was rounded off with a pint and a read in a large-ish pub in the back streets of Stratford, as the promised rain finally started to bucket it down, and then back to the B&B for the Fifth Age of … ROCK!, and coming into the closing stretch of the 1,400-page monster I was ploughing through.
Sunday began with another good breakfast, and another great English archetypes – the Miserables Over Breakfast. Seated behind me, I barely got to see them, but the tremulous tones of the woman reminded us that although the sun was shining “It might get worse, you know”, and about how difficult life was. In some ways I’m thankful for people like this, because there’s nothing like that attitude to remind me that maybe it WON’T get worse, maybe everything will Wonderful! Amazing! Maybe there will be Tigers, and Miracles, and A 1,000 Elephants! Indeed, I went to my room and immediately put on the Sodom and Gomorrah Show, one of the most relentlessly chipper pieces of music I’ve heard in years…
I was due to leave Stratford at 10am, and to be honest, I felt I’d seen most of what I wanted to see. Though I’m glad I went, and it is a pretty town, I didn’t feel any need to drastically revise my opening impression of Stratford – that it is essentially a one-trick pony, but fortunately it’s a bloody good trick. As with that other great tourist trap, Windsor, I think the town isn’t half as beautiful as it thinks it is, and that you can see everything you need to in a relatively short space of time. But for all that, Stratford has one huge asset which will always make it worthwhile – the theatre. No matter how assiduously you search for the ghost of Shakespeare the man through the streets and alleys of Stratford, what matters is what he wrote, and as long as there are dedicated men and women speaking those wonderful words, the place will always be worth visiting. Indeed, I was lucky enough to run into one of them –walking to the station along the river, I bumped into a Weird Sister getting into her car, and wished her good luck with the rest of the run. She didn’t curse me or make a lunge for my chaudron, so probably I got off pretty lightly.
From Stratford, owing to the engineering works which are very much a part of my life at the moment, I was on a bus to Warwick, which I had decided to make a trip to en route back to London. Warwick is famous for its castle, which is a blinder (and with an appropriately blinding entrance fee), but is a very pleasant town even without it. In fact (whisper it soft), architecturally it knocks Stratford into a cocked hat.
The main place I wanted to visit was Lord Leycester’s Hospital, which I had seen on Dimbleby’s current travels the week before. A 15th-century guildhall built over the West gate to the town (which is probably the most imposing town gate I have ever come across, being a ribbed tunnel about twenty feet long), it has been a home for retired ex-servicemen for over 400 years. The architecture is glorious – wooden-framed buildings, with extravagant half-timbering and many carvings, including a delightful series of bears with ragged staffs (the Leycester crest) in various poses. There is also a delightful garden, with all sorts of flowers I couldn’t identify – my horticultural knowledge extends about to knowing that if it’s green it’s alright, and if it’s brown it isn’t. To be honest, you don’t get a lot for your fiver at Lord Leicester’s, but what is there is very beautiful, and well worth seeing.
I did walk in the general direction of the Castle, playing the usual Skinflint Man’s Buff, of seeing how close I could get to the castle without paying. The answer was, of course, not very, but down at the bottom of Mill Street, beyond more beautiful houses, I found a garden which, for a voluntary £1.50, gave me a magnificent view of the Castle, with the River Avon and the ruined 14th century bridge thrown in. As a spot for a restful sit, you really couldn’t improve on it, and there wasn’t some pimply dweeb straining to get their Equity Card by dressing up as Ye Olde Jollye Keeper of Ye Privy or similar.
My last stop in Warwick was the church of St Mary, which is a stunner – one of only eighteen in England to get the full five stars from the hypercritical Simon Jenkins. Its glory is the Beauchamp Chapel, a perfect slice of Gothic architecture, and final resting-place of, amongst others, Robert Dudley, the man most likely to know whether Elizabeth I really was the Virgin Queen. In fact, although it has suffered a certain amount of over-zealous restoration, the church is one of the most spectacular non-cathedral churches I have ever seen – probably only St Lawrence’s at Ludlow matches it for variety of wonders.
What struck me most about Warwick, when I stopped to think about it, was the absence of serious shopping. I found a Smith’s and a Woolworth’s, but no M&S, no Next, no HMV, not even a Boot’s as far as I could see. In all likelihood this was because the town is umbilically connected to Leamington Spa, which has all these things in abundance, but nonetheless it did give the town centre a rather pleasant, if slightly strange, ambience. And the architecture really is quite splendid – a fire in 1694 cleared much of the town out, leaving a fringe of half-timbered houses round the edge, and a variety (mainly Georgian) closer to the centre. Even the dread words “The redevelopment of the town centre, begun in 1965” didn’t manage to damage it too badly.
From Warwick I returned to London, and a very pleasant evening in that most agreeable of clubhouses, the Pembury, followed by more transport foul-ups (the fault being all mine for not checking timetables), leaving me with a three-hour journey from Hackney to Ely, and imminent physical collapse by the time I finally rolled in at midnight.
I had never seen any Chekhov, or indeed any Russian drama, so approached this with an open mind. The extent of my knowledge of the play was a quote from Withnail and I, in which Withnail scorns the idea of understudying Konstantin with the words “I’m not going to understudy anyone – especially not that little pimple”.
In the event, I was pleasantly surprised. The Seagull is, if anything, a meditation on art, and the effect it has on life, and while no doubt full of symbolism which passed me by like steam through a football net, is also a good strong storyline, and (perhaps surprisingly to those expecting “women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow”) in places extremely funny. And, being directed by Trevor Nunn, it was immaculately put together.
As the nominal lead in what is essentially an ensemble piece, Frances Barber was very good as Arkadina – her style is very over the top (witness her role as Billie Trix in the Pet Shop Boys ill-fated musical Closer to Heaven), but then Arkadina is a classic prima donna actress, unwilling to let anyone else have their sliver of her limelight.
Konstantin, likewise, made sense to me – no matter how much one may try to sympathise with his struggle with Art, he is a little pimple, and tries everything to get his own way, especially with the willowy Nina, whose desire to be an actress overcomes even having to lead in his excrescence of a New Dramatic play.
Of course, all eyes in the theatre were on Sir Ian McKellen, as Sorin. Although not a major part, McKellen played it as well as you would expect him to, constantly acting and in character, even when not doing anything for ten minutes. He was a joy to watch, and even a disturbing likeness to Michael Gambon’s Albus Dumbledore in the last act couldn’t spoil that.
I can’t really give an impression of the how good the production was as a whole, having never seen any other productions of Chekhov, let alone The Seagull, to compare it to. But I enjoyed it, and did not count the time taken to watch it. It also gave life to something Timothy West said about Chekhov which I had never had a yardstick for before – that the reason English actors struggle with Russian drama is that thy don’t trust the instant access to the emotions that is a part of the Russian character (feel free to contradict me if you wish,doseybat) – an English actor, being asked to explode with anger on page 25, will commonly skip back to page 21 to find a place where he can start building up, whereas Chekhov and his ilk often demand a move from equanimity to furious anger to great elation and back to equanimity, all within the space of a page.
Now to find time to see the Cherry Orchard
Unlike the Chekhov, I knew exactly what I was getting with Macbeth, as it is a play I know well. I also knew, from the word on the street about the production, that I would be getting a lot of blood and thunder and witchly intervention. And so it proved.
If I had to sum up the production as a whole, I would say it was Trying Too Hard. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s least ambiguous plays (more ambiguous than Titus Andronicus, but then a punch in the kidneys is more ambiguous than Titus Andronicus), but the production stripped away what little ambiguity it might have had. Macbeth was played as a straight-down-the-line psychopath, from his initial frenzied attack in the initial (entirely invented) battle scene to his final screaming confrontation with Macduff. The production brought the Weird Sisters into every aspect of the play, as a castle servants, and manipulators of everything around the King, from the ghostly dagger to Banquo’s Ghost. They even played the Porter between them – as much a part of the castle as its stones. This was an interesting angle, but not a particularly satisfying one – there are complexities within Macbeth’s characters, which if explored make the last act more interesting, and this approach cut them off.
The cast was a mix principally of West Indian and Irish, with a scattering of actual Scots, most notably a bear-like Macduff, and the least weird of the Weird Sisters. Macbeth himself was Northern Irish, and while undoubtedly a powerful actor, had possibly bought into the Stephen Berkoff School of Muscular Lunacy a bit too much, leaving him a little pantomime-like at times.
For all this, and the large quantities of stage gore about the place (the production had a particularly unhealthy fixation with dead babies and dolls, for some reason), it was a good piece of theatre. The staging was inventive, with full use made of the balconies and galleries which litter the Swan’s playing area, and lots of fire and other distractions. The pace was unflagging, which is the way Macbeth should be – it is a straightforward storyline, to be told fast and furious – and the air of warlike suspicion and paranoia palpable.
All in all, while I wouldn’t say it’s a production to rush out and see (few productions of Macbeth are, one of the reasons it is a name of ill-omen among theatre-folk), it was a rollicking good afternoon’s theatre, and a fine entertainment
Having escaped work by the simple expedient of ignoring all emails and phone messages for 15 minutes then assuming I had nothing urgent to do, I left Cambridge under threat of rain, and equally dire threat of absence of train. The service I wanted couldn’t decide whether to be on time or cancelled – in the end it settled grumpily for a compromise of ten minutes late and on a different platform, and delivered me safely to Kings Cross, and the Tube (working smoothly for once) on to Marylebone.
Where, with perfect timing, I discovered that some dickwit had run his double-decker bus into a bridge at South Ruislip, and all services were currently suspended. By this point I was beginning to suspect my trip was cursed, and that the best thing I could do was go and hole up and get drunk somewhere – thankfully, the bus was dislodged with a drawn-out squeak, and train services resumed. Much to my surprise, the 14:54 to Stratford-upon-Avon, which one wouldn’t have pegged as one of the great arterial rail routes, was crammed to the doors – mostly with people going home to Beaconsfield, as it happens. Poor buggers.
Chiltern railways, which is to say everything going out of Marylebone, feels somewhat old-fashioned – even though the trains are new, the long stretches of country and windswept stations feel from a different age. This is probably not surprising, because the Chiltern network is basically two unexpected survivors of the Beeching cuts – the old back-route to Birmingham, and the stub of the Great Central. Probably the biggest population centre it serves which isn’t served quicker from another London terminus is Leamington Spa, which gives you an idea just what a throbbing throughway the main Chiltern line is.
After two and a half-hours of pootling through small towns and very English countryside (Warwickshire, after all, prides itself on being the Heart of England, for better or worse), I arrived in Stratford and set out for my home for the next two nights.
This proved to be a B&B of delirious excess. From the ersatz half-timbering to the embossed tiles up the path, and most particularly in the dozens of dolls covering every surface, this place was designed to make an impact. It did, too – I was bloody terrified, not least that when darkness fell there would be the clank of a thousand clockwork cogs meshing, and the whole house would come to life like some malign version of Coppelia.
My room, like most single rooms, was snug to the point of claustrophobia, up in the attic, with a sloping roof and a protruding beam on which I cracked my head within two minutes of arriving. Still, it had everything necessary for my purposes, and at £30 a night ensuite in a major tourist-trap, I could have done a lot worse.
Settled in, and trying to erase the image of being strangled my a kohl-eyed Victorian children’s doll from my mind, I wandered out into the town itself. Down Old Town to the Church, and up Southern lane to the theatres, I started to get fixed in my mind what the next two days would be like.
They would be like this: SHAKESPEARE. Just as you’re never more than eight feet from a rat, in Stratford you’re never more than six feet from a reference to the Bard, usually attached to something they want you to buy. My first serious brush with him was at Holy Trinity, where he is buried – fortunately, or unfortunately, the church was closed by then, so it was another thing to pack into Saturday.
Instead I went up to the Courtyard, the “temporary” 1000-seat theatre that the RSC have knocked up in an idle moment while they redesign the main house, and discovered that while there wasn’t a sniff of seats for King Lear the following night, they could get me into the Seagull that night, and that Stratford’s current big draw, Sir Ian “If You Mention Gandalf Once More…” McKellen was in it. Sold.
I had a wander round the rest of the town centre in the hour I had to kill, noting that the historic buildings had none of the continuity one sees in, say, Chester or Shrewsbury, but were scattered through the town like fruit in a plum pudding – and tat some of the more modern buildings would make for a very turgid suet indeed. Then it was back to the Courtyard, and marvelling at just what a fine job they had made of what is, when all’s said and done, a giant corrugated iron shed – three storeys of audience, a large thrust stage, and comfortable, well-spaced seating (well, unless you get a Falstaffian character sitting next to you, as I did). Something tells me that they won’t be packing it all away again the moment the new theatre is finished in 2010 – it’s altogether too good a space to lose.
The only other thing to note from the evening was the realisation that Stratford’s water defences were suffering a bit after the heavy rainfall of the past couple of days, and that the water meadows were aptly named, in that they were definitely more water than meadow. There were about five boats named after female Shakespeare characters, and I wondered if, given the speed and width of the river in flood, one could have a decent game of Pooh-stocks with them from Clopton Bridge. Maybe one day…
Saturday dawned overcast but mercifully dry, and after a deathly struggle with my own eyelids (deep sleep in cheap B&B’s is always something of a rarity), I inhaled a pleasingly passable breakfast, met some people from Mississippi (you’d never have guessed – they had opposable thumbs and everything), and set out to Do the Bard Thing.
I started back at Holy Trinity, with the grave – this is unostentatious to point of being completely self-effacing, and you only know what is written there from the piece of card with a reproduction. The bust above gives the standard view of Shakespeare as “Mr Thoughtful (With Quill Pan And Appalling Hairstyle)”, together with an inscription which I wouldn’t have been able to tread even if it hadn’t been in Latin. I was there good and early (before 9am), so I had the place comparatively to myself, apart from an Oriental woman kneeling in one of the choir stalls, who, as far as I could tell, took exactly the same picture at least 20 times. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she was a professional, rather than a complete fruit-loop, but in Stratford you can never be quite sure.
In fact, the church of Holy Trinity would be worth visiting even without its interesting heap of dust – it has a cracking set of Mediaeval misericords, and a sense of space befitting the church of a town already established 370 years when Shakespeare was born.
From the grave I travelled immediately back to the birthplace, which my Art Fund membership gets me into for free. This was probably just as well, because there isn’t a vast amount there for the standard £7 asking price. The exhibition on Shakespeare’s life is not bad, but suffers from the problem that anything on the Bard has – namely that there is almost no hard information about the bugger to be had. It probably couldn’t have been done any other way than it was, given the hordes it has to accommodate – a paragraph on lots of surrounding information, and quite a few reconstructions to peer at and buttons to press. Still and all, I don’t think it told me anything I didn’t already know, and I don’t count myself as any kind of authority on Shakespeare.
Beyond the exhibition, there is the birthplace itself, a well-preserved early 16th-century half-timbered house, which has been furnished with a reasonable stab at period pieces, though the effect is occasionally undone – the hanging in the children’s bedroom, for instance, looked absolutely terrifying. The guides also don’t have much to go on – because no matter how you slice up the experience, all we are talking about is a house where a baby was born. If you wanted a place which was central to Shakespeare’s particular genius, you would be far better off in the site of Stratford Grammar School, or the wharves of Southwark, than in Henley Street. In fact, the most interesting part of the display for me was not directly to do with Shakespeare, but rather with what had happened to the house – used as a pub and as a butcher’s shop at various times, it was displayed from the late eighteenth century by some distinctly eccentric private owners, and only narrowly avoided being dismantled and carted off to America by P T Barnum (who might have got a shock when he discovered that a major component of the fabric was cowshit). In the end I enjoyed visiting the house, and it’s something to tick off, but in the end it’s just a house, and no more interesting than any in Lavenham, or many another old English market town.
Speaking of “many another English market town”, Stratford, for all it tries to hide it, does suffer the same secret shame that many of our finest towns do – namely, truly appalling redevelopment in the 1960’s. In Stratford’s case, this is mainly found in a shopping centre called Town Square, which eats up a significant portion of the old town, and is of unparalleled hideousness. Tall concrete buildings with narrow walkways between them, it is claustrophobic, disorienting, and just downright unpleasant – a little flash of A Clockwork Orange in the middle of the tourist Mecca.
Having had my fill of all things Bardic for a while, I took
xanna’s advice, and headed for the Butterfly Farm. This, despite my misgivings, proved to be an absolute winner. What has been done, basically is to create a small area of low-lying rainforest, with a temperature around 28 degrees, and humidity in the mid 90’s. They filled the space with trees, flowers, and a large pond with a waterfall, then released a couple of thousand butterflies into it, and left them to get on with it. the effects are spectacular – huge, gorgeously-coloured butterflies float around the place, settling on people, and brightening up the place immeasurably. Everywhere you look there is another beautiful specimen – quite a few get trodden on, alas, but as the main occupation of a butterfly is to make more butterflies, they’re not likely to run out any time soon. The place can be a bit creepy, of course, mainly because the predominant noise is of small children not coping with butterflies as well as their parents thought they would. To be fair, if you’re five years old and a bright blue thing twice the width of your hand settles on your arm, a bit of worry is not unreasonable.And once the kiddies have got used to the butterflies, there’s plenty more to get them leaving puddles on the floor – through a door there is a room of Serious Insects (including a stag beetle that looked about the size of a can of Coke, and the glory that is the Giant Hissing Cockroach) and Equally Serious Lizards (I particularly liked Colin the Gecko). Then beyond that there’s the spiders and scorpions – I don’t care how many times people ell me that tarantulas are completely harmless, I can’t help the suspicion that that’s just what the tarantulas want us to think. And one of the scorpions was definitely trying to tunnel out of its enclosure…
After that display of nature red in tooth and claw, it was time to see mankind in the same state – an hour after escaping the butterflies, and after wringing myself out thoroughly (that level of humidity wears you out a lot more than you expect), I was settling in another theatre seat, this time in the Swan (the RSC’s second space, and really just a smaller version of the Courtyard), for Macbeth.
Reeling back into the sunshine after the play, I knew that it was time for the Great Lost Hope, and after grabbing some cash, made my way to the Courtyard, to queue for returns for Lear. Having accidentally joined the wrong end of the queue, and been subjected to the full morose force of a Leeds woman who made Eeyore look like Timmy Mallett, I joined the Queue of Doom – though there were only about 20 of us, the atmosphere was ridiculously funereal. There was a woman muttering feverishly to anyone who’d listen “I’m just going to pray”, and another on the verge of tears, telling us all how “this is the worst possible thing”. Theatre brings out the strangest in people, and also people who are pretty strange to start with, but I’d never seen anything like this. It was also funny to observe the four American teenagers, trying to remain cheerful in the face of so much concentrated English gloom, and not really succeeding.
The Yorkshire Weeper and her brow-beaten husband, who had allegedly been there since 10am (it was 5:30pm by this point), got in (to about the worst seats in the house), and the rest of the diehards stuck at it, but by 5:45, I and the woman I‘d got talking to decided we’d had enough (there were zero returns at that point), and walked back out into the sunshine, away from the enclave of doom. The experience had left me with two over-riding thoughts:
i) if you were that desperate, why in heaven’s name didn’t you get tickets when they were on sale?
ii) wonderful though seeing McKellen as Lear would definitely be, it is in the end a night at the theatre, not your only child’s inauguration as President.
Having failed to make it three plays in 24 hours (which may be just as well – you get into a strange mindset when you watch a lot of theatre in a short space of time, and it can be hard to stop), I stopped off to change clothes, and wandered out to Shottery, and another of the tourist trail stops I wasn’t going to make – Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Shottery is trembling on the edge of being a suburb of Stratford, but still just about manages to retain a village atmosphere, even if its pub looks anything but countrified. The Cottage itself is charming, as you would imagine – long and low, impeccably thatched, and set within a profusion of flowers, it looks every inch the romantic idyll. I didn’t feel especially broken-hearted to not be seeing inside it, but I’m glad I paid it a visit.
The evening was rounded off with a pint and a read in a large-ish pub in the back streets of Stratford, as the promised rain finally started to bucket it down, and then back to the B&B for the Fifth Age of … ROCK!, and coming into the closing stretch of the 1,400-page monster I was ploughing through.
Sunday began with another good breakfast, and another great English archetypes – the Miserables Over Breakfast. Seated behind me, I barely got to see them, but the tremulous tones of the woman reminded us that although the sun was shining “It might get worse, you know”, and about how difficult life was. In some ways I’m thankful for people like this, because there’s nothing like that attitude to remind me that maybe it WON’T get worse, maybe everything will Wonderful! Amazing! Maybe there will be Tigers, and Miracles, and A 1,000 Elephants! Indeed, I went to my room and immediately put on the Sodom and Gomorrah Show, one of the most relentlessly chipper pieces of music I’ve heard in years…
I was due to leave Stratford at 10am, and to be honest, I felt I’d seen most of what I wanted to see. Though I’m glad I went, and it is a pretty town, I didn’t feel any need to drastically revise my opening impression of Stratford – that it is essentially a one-trick pony, but fortunately it’s a bloody good trick. As with that other great tourist trap, Windsor, I think the town isn’t half as beautiful as it thinks it is, and that you can see everything you need to in a relatively short space of time. But for all that, Stratford has one huge asset which will always make it worthwhile – the theatre. No matter how assiduously you search for the ghost of Shakespeare the man through the streets and alleys of Stratford, what matters is what he wrote, and as long as there are dedicated men and women speaking those wonderful words, the place will always be worth visiting. Indeed, I was lucky enough to run into one of them –walking to the station along the river, I bumped into a Weird Sister getting into her car, and wished her good luck with the rest of the run. She didn’t curse me or make a lunge for my chaudron, so probably I got off pretty lightly.
From Stratford, owing to the engineering works which are very much a part of my life at the moment, I was on a bus to Warwick, which I had decided to make a trip to en route back to London. Warwick is famous for its castle, which is a blinder (and with an appropriately blinding entrance fee), but is a very pleasant town even without it. In fact (whisper it soft), architecturally it knocks Stratford into a cocked hat.
The main place I wanted to visit was Lord Leycester’s Hospital, which I had seen on Dimbleby’s current travels the week before. A 15th-century guildhall built over the West gate to the town (which is probably the most imposing town gate I have ever come across, being a ribbed tunnel about twenty feet long), it has been a home for retired ex-servicemen for over 400 years. The architecture is glorious – wooden-framed buildings, with extravagant half-timbering and many carvings, including a delightful series of bears with ragged staffs (the Leycester crest) in various poses. There is also a delightful garden, with all sorts of flowers I couldn’t identify – my horticultural knowledge extends about to knowing that if it’s green it’s alright, and if it’s brown it isn’t. To be honest, you don’t get a lot for your fiver at Lord Leicester’s, but what is there is very beautiful, and well worth seeing.
I did walk in the general direction of the Castle, playing the usual Skinflint Man’s Buff, of seeing how close I could get to the castle without paying. The answer was, of course, not very, but down at the bottom of Mill Street, beyond more beautiful houses, I found a garden which, for a voluntary £1.50, gave me a magnificent view of the Castle, with the River Avon and the ruined 14th century bridge thrown in. As a spot for a restful sit, you really couldn’t improve on it, and there wasn’t some pimply dweeb straining to get their Equity Card by dressing up as Ye Olde Jollye Keeper of Ye Privy or similar.
My last stop in Warwick was the church of St Mary, which is a stunner – one of only eighteen in England to get the full five stars from the hypercritical Simon Jenkins. Its glory is the Beauchamp Chapel, a perfect slice of Gothic architecture, and final resting-place of, amongst others, Robert Dudley, the man most likely to know whether Elizabeth I really was the Virgin Queen. In fact, although it has suffered a certain amount of over-zealous restoration, the church is one of the most spectacular non-cathedral churches I have ever seen – probably only St Lawrence’s at Ludlow matches it for variety of wonders.
What struck me most about Warwick, when I stopped to think about it, was the absence of serious shopping. I found a Smith’s and a Woolworth’s, but no M&S, no Next, no HMV, not even a Boot’s as far as I could see. In all likelihood this was because the town is umbilically connected to Leamington Spa, which has all these things in abundance, but nonetheless it did give the town centre a rather pleasant, if slightly strange, ambience. And the architecture really is quite splendid – a fire in 1694 cleared much of the town out, leaving a fringe of half-timbered houses round the edge, and a variety (mainly Georgian) closer to the centre. Even the dread words “The redevelopment of the town centre, begun in 1965” didn’t manage to damage it too badly.
From Warwick I returned to London, and a very pleasant evening in that most agreeable of clubhouses, the Pembury, followed by more transport foul-ups (the fault being all mine for not checking timetables), leaving me with a three-hour journey from Hackney to Ely, and imminent physical collapse by the time I finally rolled in at midnight.
I had never seen any Chekhov, or indeed any Russian drama, so approached this with an open mind. The extent of my knowledge of the play was a quote from Withnail and I, in which Withnail scorns the idea of understudying Konstantin with the words “I’m not going to understudy anyone – especially not that little pimple”.
In the event, I was pleasantly surprised. The Seagull is, if anything, a meditation on art, and the effect it has on life, and while no doubt full of symbolism which passed me by like steam through a football net, is also a good strong storyline, and (perhaps surprisingly to those expecting “women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow”) in places extremely funny. And, being directed by Trevor Nunn, it was immaculately put together.
As the nominal lead in what is essentially an ensemble piece, Frances Barber was very good as Arkadina – her style is very over the top (witness her role as Billie Trix in the Pet Shop Boys ill-fated musical Closer to Heaven), but then Arkadina is a classic prima donna actress, unwilling to let anyone else have their sliver of her limelight.
Konstantin, likewise, made sense to me – no matter how much one may try to sympathise with his struggle with Art, he is a little pimple, and tries everything to get his own way, especially with the willowy Nina, whose desire to be an actress overcomes even having to lead in his excrescence of a New Dramatic play.
Of course, all eyes in the theatre were on Sir Ian McKellen, as Sorin. Although not a major part, McKellen played it as well as you would expect him to, constantly acting and in character, even when not doing anything for ten minutes. He was a joy to watch, and even a disturbing likeness to Michael Gambon’s Albus Dumbledore in the last act couldn’t spoil that.
I can’t really give an impression of the how good the production was as a whole, having never seen any other productions of Chekhov, let alone The Seagull, to compare it to. But I enjoyed it, and did not count the time taken to watch it. It also gave life to something Timothy West said about Chekhov which I had never had a yardstick for before – that the reason English actors struggle with Russian drama is that thy don’t trust the instant access to the emotions that is a part of the Russian character (feel free to contradict me if you wish,
doseybat) – an English actor, being asked to explode with anger on page 25, will commonly skip back to page 21 to find a place where he can start building up, whereas Chekhov and his ilk often demand a move from equanimity to furious anger to great elation and back to equanimity, all within the space of a page.Now to find time to see the Cherry Orchard
Unlike the Chekhov, I knew exactly what I was getting with Macbeth, as it is a play I know well. I also knew, from the word on the street about the production, that I would be getting a lot of blood and thunder and witchly intervention. And so it proved.
If I had to sum up the production as a whole, I would say it was Trying Too Hard. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s least ambiguous plays (more ambiguous than Titus Andronicus, but then a punch in the kidneys is more ambiguous than Titus Andronicus), but the production stripped away what little ambiguity it might have had. Macbeth was played as a straight-down-the-line psychopath, from his initial frenzied attack in the initial (entirely invented) battle scene to his final screaming confrontation with Macduff. The production brought the Weird Sisters into every aspect of the play, as a castle servants, and manipulators of everything around the King, from the ghostly dagger to Banquo’s Ghost. They even played the Porter between them – as much a part of the castle as its stones. This was an interesting angle, but not a particularly satisfying one – there are complexities within Macbeth’s characters, which if explored make the last act more interesting, and this approach cut them off.
The cast was a mix principally of West Indian and Irish, with a scattering of actual Scots, most notably a bear-like Macduff, and the least weird of the Weird Sisters. Macbeth himself was Northern Irish, and while undoubtedly a powerful actor, had possibly bought into the Stephen Berkoff School of Muscular Lunacy a bit too much, leaving him a little pantomime-like at times.
For all this, and the large quantities of stage gore about the place (the production had a particularly unhealthy fixation with dead babies and dolls, for some reason), it was a good piece of theatre. The staging was inventive, with full use made of the balconies and galleries which litter the Swan’s playing area, and lots of fire and other distractions. The pace was unflagging, which is the way Macbeth should be – it is a straightforward storyline, to be told fast and furious – and the air of warlike suspicion and paranoia palpable.
All in all, while I wouldn’t say it’s a production to rush out and see (few productions of Macbeth are, one of the reasons it is a name of ill-omen among theatre-folk), it was a rollicking good afternoon’s theatre, and a fine entertainment
