This excellent new play by Helen Edmundson is the third of the RSC’s linked plays – Written on the Heart, Measure for Measure and The Heresy of Love. Its a powerful and emotional play about intellectual freedom and betrayal. The main character is Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, based on Sor Juana of Mexico who became one of the most significant playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age but whose work was suppressed by the Church.

Sister Juana is a modern woman, born in the wrong way (she was illegitimate) in the wrong place (Mexico) at the wrong time (that of the Spanish Inquisition) and the wrong sex (female). She is powerfully played by Catherine McCormack who conveys Sister Juana’s intellectual honesty as well as her radiant beauty aided by clever costuming and lighting. The play’s conflict is between her and the repressive church, represented by an astonishingly vile bigot, Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas played as skilfully by Stephen Boxer as his William Tyndale was in Written on the Heart. In the middle for a while is the more liberal Bishop Santa Cruz (Raymond Coulthard) until his political schemings force him to change his tactics.

The messages about human frailty, pride and betrayal are as relevant now as they were in the seventeenth century. Director Nancy Meckler deemphasises the Roman Catholic in order to prompt thought about any kind of self-righteous repressive regime characterised by power, male dominance, self-interest and self-righteousness. There is a significant elemnent of the play about heresy, but it is heresy in any kind of context, and about love, but love, lust and self-regarding are more important ideas than those about love of God.

That is why, perhaps, the second part opens with the Archbishop engaged in an amazingly self-regarding narcissistic display of sado-masochistic self-flagellation which sets the conceptual framework for the second half of the play.

In the end armageddon beckons with the results of the betrayals, the arrival of floods, the plague and the death of many of the main characters. While the Archbishop proclaims that this is all an indication that God is angry the audience looks for other interpretations and finds them in human behaviour rather than in religious doctrine. I was drawn to betrayal. Most of the main characters engage in betrayal at some point. Towards the end Sister Juana is revealed to have betrayed her niece and herself. The Spanish court represented by the Viceroy and Vicereine betray Mexico by their departure from the country and even Juana’s loyal slave Juanita, beautifully played by Dona Croll, betrays her mistress by allowing Sister Juana’s niece to engage in a sexual liaison with the vacuous courtier Don Hernando.

This play has a very strong cast – Geoffrey Beavers as Father Antonio, Marty Cruikshank as Brigida, Teresa Banham as Sister Sebastiana and Catherine Hamilton as the Vicereine all offer us fully realised characters – and there was a lot of laughter from the audience which only highlighted the horror of the betrayals. The unitary set is beautifully managed, the blocking on the thrust is unfussily handled and the emtoional patterning of the play ensures that the audience is kept spellbound throughout. Not only are the costumes lovely and effective; the use of posture as a characterisation and emotional tool is splendid. Something else I enjoyed enormously was the singing.

I thought that it would be unlikely that I would see anything else this season which I enjoyed as much as I had enjoyed Written on the Heart. Even without the almost  incomparable Oliver Ford Davies I enjoyed this production just as much. And because the links between the three plays are so complex  and interesting, I am tempted to see Measure for Measure again.

If you get the chance try to see all three;  if you can or if you can’t a warm welcome at Moss Cottage awaits you.

Written on the Heart

Although ostensibly about the translation of the King
James Bible in 1611, this new play by David Edgar is really about the
feasibility of being a liberal humanist man of conscience in a setting where
political behaviour is thought to be essential. The main character is Launcelot
Andrews who tries to reconcile the pressure of Puritanism with the continuation
of a church which goes back to recent Catholic times.

Edgar cleverly parallels two stories – that of
Andrews, in his early years trying to enforce the new ecclesiastical order
against the old, and that of William Tyndale, imprisoned and killed for
translating the Bible into English. These two stories are brought together at
the end when Andrews is pressured into adjudicating the final contentious changes
to the 1611 translation and is visited by the ghost of Andrews.

Thrown into this mix is the issue of fundamentalism,
represented by Andrew’s servant, Mary Currer, vigorously played by Jodie McNee.
She may be a servant but she is educated, having been taught to read and write
by her father.  She does know her place,
but she has outgrown it and dares to speak her mind to Andrews although she
submits to her master’s authority and bidding at the end of the play.

In the end Edgar suggests that conscience and power
are incompatible. Gordon Brown discovered, too, that principle could not
successfully be chosen against ambition. Andrews refuses to be a contender for
the archbishopric of Canterbury, instead supporting the claim of Bishop Abbot
from the Right. Shades of the Labour party leadership election fiasco?

None of this seems like much of a theatrical
blockbuster for 2011 and yet I found the play gripping on both Preview
occasions I saw it. Director Greg Doran opts frequently for stillness rather
than business and this works because the play stars two of our most outstanding
undersung contemporary actors, Oliver Ford Davies as Andrews and Stephen Boxer
as Tyndale. Ford Davies’s emission of sibilant s sounds and slight incline of
the head speak volumes throughout the play. His body reveals a huge range of
emotion through tiny nuances. His enunciation is brilliantly clear and his
control complete. It is as good as performance – perhaps even more powerful –
than his Lionel in Racing Demon at
the National all those years ago. I found the scene between Andrews and Tyndale
at the end of the play extraordinarily powerful, perhaps because both Ford
Davies and Boxer can understate, too.

The other highlight of the production for me was the
scene between Tyndale and the Young Catholic Priest in the first half. The
latter visits Tyndale ostensibly to save his soul but smuggles the manuscript
of the translated Bible instead so that it can be published as the Rogers
Bible. The scene is daringly staged on a small raised block in the centre of
the stage and in semi-darkness. Neither actor moves very much. Mark Quartley as
the Young Catholic Priest mirrors Boxer’s physical circumspection. Vocally and
physically he is in complete control. It is a wonderful scene.

The music is glorious, Paul Englishby’s old-modern,
catholic-protestant ecclesiastical interludes beautifully sung by Anna Bolton,
Alexandra Saunders, Mitesh Khatri, Matthew Spillett and Lewis Jones.

Cohesion is achieved by the frequent use of the play’s
title and its enigmatic link to love and by the burning of hands in candleflame,
as well as by the passing of the chalice eventually to Andrews and the passing
of Tyndale’s translation into Andrews’s pile of
books. The play is carefully framed by Edgar who places Andrews’s internal
dilemmas at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the piece and
invites us to wonder whether when Andrews looks out at the audience and asks
‘Who is there?’ he is looking for the spirit of Tyndale or whether we as
observers have some part to play in the political, moral, ethical and spiritual
debate which the play explores.

Left, right, centre, compromise, pragmatism, ambition:
is there the possibility of triangulation or are we heading to disaster? I had
not expected before I went to Written on
the Heart that I would end up thinking about so many of the issues raised
by Marat/Sade. And both plays, too,
are about words and their potential for multiple meanings and translations. A
brilliant piece of programming.

You’ve only got another ten days to see Peter
Weiss’s  Marat/Sade in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It’s a rare
opportunity to see a production of perhaps the best example of Theatre of
Cruelty from almost half a century ago.

First produced by the RSC in 1964 the play was
controversial, mainly because of its overlapping quadruple metaphor – that
madness, politics, theatre and sexual behaviour are metaphors for each other.
The play shocked when it was first performed in Britain because audiences were
not used to graphic sexual content. We have become so used to this that I
expected the play to look creaky and old-fashioned and to a certain extent it
does. Awash with alienation techniques, ensuring that the audience does not become
engaged emotionally with the characters, it certainly doesn’t adhere to any of
the quick, sharp sound-bite techniques that we have become used to in this
digital age. It is very long, designed to be so, all the more since it is
almost an hour and three quarters to the interval by which time the idea has
been hammered into the audience’s heads that, in contrast to the naive optimism
of the early sixties of Beatlemania, we are all buggers or all buggered,
graphically shown by the rape scene and the end of the first part. All very
straightforward stuff.

So imagine my amazement to read the front page article
in Stratford’s free rag, Midweek Herald,
by a modern-day Mary Whitehouse called Sandy Holt (as naive as Mary Whitehouse over
Romans in Britain and as ignorant of
theatre) which begins:

The Royal Shakespeare Company has
said it has no intention of pulling the show

that has seen hundreds of its
audience walk out because of its gross indecency,

nudity and scenes of torture.

Apparently
audiences (perhaps tainted by the twenty-first century popularity of
fundamentalism) are no more able to deal with metaphor and no more able to
engage their brains than some members of London audiences were in the 1960s and
70s. And, curiously, it’s sex that shocks these modern-day Whitehouses. Not
religion, not politics, not psychosis – sex.
Amazing.

The
production is beautifully choreographed. A large cast is deployed with
consummate ease through a vast range of blocking movements.  The timeless, placeless set with metaphorical
scaffolding and a padded floor are constant reminders of the asylum that the
play is set in, that we are witnessing and that we ourselves are metaphorically
part of. The alienation technique of having characters break character, of
featuring actors playing asylum inmates assuming characters which are only
intermittently consistent because they can’t remember the play means that it is
hard to sit back and admire the acting. In a sense this, too, is part of the
metaphorical patterning of the play. We may be alienated from the realness of
the characters but we can still become from time to time engaged with some
aspect of what they are enacting. I had not realised in 1964 how Adrian
Mitchell’s rhyming couplets also strike a dissonant tone – a further metaphor
at the heart of the text’s structure.

Marat/Sade
is a fine ensemble piece where the audience is never sure what will happen next
because the world it depicts is Absurd, all enacted by mental  patients – Absurdity on a quite different
level.

There
are, of course, oddities. Perhaps nowadays audiences are less familiar with
Brechtian devices than they were half a century ago, but within play audiences,
multiple shifts of character, characters playing characters playing characters,
improvisation and pseudo improvisation have all found their way into movies and
television.

But this
production is no mere historical reconstruction. It is brilliantly updated,
with masses of references to what has happened since 1964 – Thatcher’s
‘glorious years’, Guantanamo Bay, the final days and death of  Bin Laden, Islamic movements, even Big
Brother,  to name but a few – both
intentional and unintentional.  The
director cannot have thought of the power of seeing the production on the day
that Gaddafi was killed with all the complex moral horror associated with that.

Theatre
of Cruelty speaks of the unspeakable. Amazingly and quite against my
expectations this 2011 production did, too.  Watch for the many ways in which the brilliant
director Anthony Neilson has created contemporary resonances and references.
Listen carefully to Khyam Allami’s wonderful score (and buy a programme to read
his excellent article).

Go see it
before it’s too late. And if you want to stay overnight a warm welcome awaits
you at Moss Cottage.

The Homecoming

I thought The
Homecoming was chilling and scary when I first saw it in the early 1970s.
It still is. The passage of time, though, has made it a lot easier to
understand, although the experience of seeing it in theatre is still gripping.
You want to know what these ghastly people are going to do and say next.

I hadn’t realised forty years ago that it’s a study in
repetition compulsion in that despite his PhD Teddy marries his mother and Ruth
acts out what the rest of the family are denying. Max immediately recognises
her as a whore, treats her as one, welcomes her into the family and shows that
he, too (as well as Teddy and Joey), wants to sleep with her. Pimp Lenny just
wants to make money out of her. Nasty stuff, only just redeemed by making Sam
some sort of moral yardstick or, at least, some sort of reflection of
“normality”.

Perhaps it’s the non-ticking clock which keeps Lenny
awake that is the key metaphor in this production. Linear time is unimportant.
The present repeats and overlays the past and vice versa.

The play is superbly acted. Jonathan Slinger’s Lenny,
is full of Pinteresque menace, every muscle controlled. Richard Riddell’s Joey
is stolidly dim, devoid of feeling or evident brain activity. Nicholas Woodeson
as Max shows an enormous range of expression, changing like quicksilver. Aislin
McGuckin’s Ruth is wholly controlled, enigmatic and inscrutable. Justin
Salinger’s Teddy, rarely displaying any emotion at all, is just as chilling as
the rest. A ghastly crew. Des McAleer’s Sam is the only character the audience
can begin to identify with. He tries to be creative in the kitchen and tries to
clean up dirty things. Sam dies, of course. In this world to speak the truth,
to reveal what life was really like in the past, is your death warrant. Attacks
of the heart are rare but fatal.

David Farr’s production is coherent, superbly paced
and characterised by appropriate empty physical spaces. I wouldn’t have missed
it, but I don’t want to see it again. It’s a fine production of a beautifully
written hideous play.

P.S. I’m adding Jonathan Slinger, Richard Riddell and
Aislin McGuckin to my list of impressively versatile actors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is a must see production (as is The Merchant of Venice). The playing is
outstanding, the direction imaginative and often lovely to watch and the
interpretation is conceptually coherent. I have never seen such a vibrant Helena.
Lucy Briggs-Owen’s shrill athletic Helena is a million miles away from her
Luscinda in Cardenio but the
character is just as fully realised. An often hilarious triumph. Alex Hassell
as Demetrius shows off his acrobatic skills and Nathaniel Martello-White speaks
the verse beautifully as Lysander. I didn’t warm to Arsher Ali’s Puck but he
did make the idea of Puck as Philostrate and vice-versa thought provoking and
interesting. As Puck he was more of a manager of “mirthlessness” than of
“mirth” taking on some of the grumpiness of his 60s court character. Jo Stone
Fewings as Oberon and Pippa Nixon as Titania were delightful, serving to
contast their RP fairy characters with their London-accented human alter egos.

One of our friends said that it was well worth going
just to see the play within the play. Rehearsal scenes and the play itself were
brisk and clever. Chike Okonkwo’s muscled wall was a hoot, as was Felix Hayes’s
lion. I loved all of them but Marc Wooton’s braying was the best thing. He was
a completely convincing ass and his series of parodies of film versions of
Shakespearian actors an unexpected delight. Be prepared for a surprise when the
mechanicals’ curtain is accidentally parted.

For those who know the play very well there are some
very interesting moments.  The doubling
of Theseus and Hippolyta and Oberon and Titania is very cleverly done. There is
no love lost at all between Hippolyta and Theseus at the beginning of the play.
She thinks nothing of Theseus’s attentions nor of his support of Aegeus’s
dominant patriarchal view of socety, claiming his daughter Hermia as his
property to dispose of how he wants. She wouldn’t as a captive Amazon Queen.
But at the end the wedding is harmonious. She appears to like Theseus and is
full of smiles. Why? How? It seems to be that it’s her contact with magic. Not
only are the pairs doubled but our attention is drawn to the doubling. After
Theseus has released Titania from her spell, they undress each other from their
fairy king and queen’s garments and dress each other in their earthly
characters’ garments. Theseus and Hippolyta are Oberon are Titania and vice
versa. It has always seemed odd to me that Titania shows no resentment towards
Oberon for having made her become besotted with an ass. However, here,
Hippolyta (who is Titania in some sense) learns from Titania’s forgiveness of
Oberon and is reconciled to marriage with Theseus. Not just reconciled but
happy about it. Forgiveness and love in the spirit world transfers into the
human world.

Something similar happens with the four lovers. Their
experiences in the spirit world allow them to become harmonious partners.

I wasn’t sure about the ballet of suspended chairs but
I think that was because I was sitting in the stalls. If you sit in the
Galleries then you have to look through the wood of the chairs in order to see
what is going on. Wood. Chairs. The wood of the fairy world clouds but softens
the human world. A bit the same with the Mechanicals using the new deep trap.
They entered and descended on their first entrance in Act II to do electrical
work after the lights have fused and at the end they descended again to do the
same thing. Despite the rude comments of the courtiers (mercifully somewhat cut
in this production) they cannot survive without the underclass.

One of the delights of the repertory system is seeing
fine actors play such different parts in the same season. So far it’s Lucy
Briggs-Owen and Christopher Godwin who have wowed me with their versatility.
And I wait eagerly too see what brilliant director Nancy Meckler does next. I
have not seen her work before and I want lots more.

A Merchant of Venice

 The Merchant is set in Las Vegas. My partner thought I wouldn’t like it. He was wrong. I loved it. First of all, I thought the ideas came from the text. Secondly, I wished I had thought about these ideas when I taught the play for GCSE and A Level. I didn’t.

Las Vegas is about gambling (established at the beginning and before the dialogue begins. Make sure you’re in your seats at least 10 minutes before the start time). Antonio gambles with his money in argosies. Bassanio gambles for Portia in the casket game. Shylock gambles on a naive reading of the law. Portia and Nerissa gamble on a silly psychological game of the rings. Even Launcelot Gobbo gambles on being with the right religion because he doesn’t care about either. He only cares about Elvis. At the end it’s possible that Portia gambled at reading the emotional and psychological dimensions of the suit for her correctly; she might not have done. Brilliant! And complex.

Then, now and whenever are all muddled up, intertwined, and time becomes irrelevant. Portia is filmed for a ghastly TV programme with her suitors. She is a great performer and hates the show.  She, a Texan hussy heiress,  is on the make. Bassanio is on the make (why had I not seen this from the text when he makes absolutely clear that he is wooing Portia because she is ‘richly left’and because he has lost (squandered?) his money?). Antonio is on the make. He is gambling in a casino even though all his money is in his argosies. Shylock is on the make because he thinks he can get one over on the Christians.

These ghastly materialists all lose out. What is unusual and what I had never thought of before is that the only one who is in the same place at the end as at the beginning is Antonio. He is alone, gambling at the beginning. He is alone at the end. And Scott Handy, with an expressionless face, distant blocking and sometimes quite flat delivery, played him as boring and unattractive. Not the dishy, betrayed guy that the gays can feel sorry for. It isn’t the way I would have asked someone to play the part. It was much more interesting than I could have thought of. If Bassanio was in love with him (as one friend who saw it thought), then there was no obvious reason except money. Idea and theme again.

There are some very unexpected things. You don’t expect Launcelot Gobbo to be an Elvis Impersonator in a casino. You don’t expect that the caskets are the basis of a TV game show where the winner gets the Texan dollybird heiress. You don’t expect that the first half Portia will manage to be Balthazar at all – that’s a good gin and tonic topic for discussion. You also don’t expect the ending. Maybe I will add something to this blog towards the end of the run, but I don’t want to put my ideas in your head before you see it. But I can pretty well guarantee that you will come out at the end asking each other “Well, what did that mean, then?”

And there’s Patrick Stewart as Shylock. He’s a bigot (but so is this Antonio). He can be very charming. His mafia friends who are involved in the Las Vegas meat business no doubt find him so. And he has some dignity. I was delighted and surprised at Stewart’s restraint. It made his character much more credible than Shylock often is, and less of a stereotype, I thought it was a wonderful performance in a production which had many fascinating performances.

Here are some questions to think about while you’re seeing it:

            We know what Bassanio’s motive is – to marry a “lady richly left”. What is Portia’s?

            What is the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio?

            What do Lorenzo and Jessica think they are up to?

            Does anyone come out with any moral credit at the end?

I thought this was a very fine production and one of the RSC’s most coherently conceptual for a long time. I shall certainly be seeing it several more times.

Macbeth

To be perfectly honest, a few years ago I decided that I’d seen enough productions of Macbeth to last me for my lifetime, but because we only moved to Stratford eighteen months ago we thought we would go and see the RSC’s Macbeth as it’s part of the new season.

It’s certainly interesting. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who doesn’t know Shakespeare’s play because if you don’t know the play there are several things which will confuse you mightily. For starters there aren’t any witches. There are three children instead and the word ‘witches’ that Shakespeare wrote comes out as ‘children’. There’s no ‘bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ and no sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap. No one went to Aleppo. The child actors playing the ‘children’ turn up later playing Lady Macduff’s children. At the end one of them is dressed up as one of the non-witch children but the other two aren’t. I tried and tried for an idea, but I couldn’t find one. Maybe I’m dim.

The interval is placed in the middle of the Banquo’s ghost banquet scene (though without any sign of a banquet and without any sitting down). Banquo is already dead but he comes in and kills Macbeth. Then it’s time for a gin and tonic. After the drink (perhaps the best metaphor of the evening) the scene is replayed without Banquo but with Macbeth doing his writhing in the same way. Even the dim in the audience can work out that Macbeth is now mad. He can’t tell the difference between his guilty imaginings (perhaps his thoughts which are ‘but fantastical’) and the pretend reality which Shakespeare asks us to believe in his play. It is established at this point that Macbeth is ‘mad’ (whatever that means in psychological terms). And he remains mad for the rest of the play. He is haunted by those he has killed. We know this because the dead people keep coming on stage. It’s a sort of idea, I suppose. The trouble is that Lady Macbeth’s madness is relegated to mere plot.

Jonathan Slinger did his best with Macbeth, I thought. He spent quite a lot of time in Act V on a ladder. The director wanted us to see Macbeth as isolated and alone and so he was isolated and alone a lot of time time. Up a ladder. The battle was, presumably, in his head because there wasn’t any military battle. I was struck by the decision to have the branches of Birnham Wood carried by Lady Macduff (why?) and the children/”children” [?]: a sort of semi-repeated idea which by now for me had become reductive.

I have always found Act IV scene iii very boring. I’m afraid I thought that this Malcolm was dreadful. I couldn’t make out some of what he said and even when I knew the speeches (I’ve taught Macbeth about 15 times) I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying and cared even less. Macduff was well played though, with some emotion and subtlety,  and that prevented me from walking out.

What in Cardenio had been a very well handled, and often surprisingly dramatic, technique of pausing before the crucial word became a meaningless and idiotic mannerism in this production. It sounded as if the actors had been told to do it without thinking about why. It sometimes garbled the verse and led to unintelligibility. I very much hope this new and very obvious vocal technique isn’t going to be a new RSC trademark.

I didn’t like this production. But it’s certainly got some ideas and it’s trying to do something. It also makes you read the text again. But I thought the main ideas were imposed on the text rather than arising from it: a startling contrast to A Merchant of Venice where the ideas come directly from the text.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it. It makes you think about what Shakespeare wrote again. And it’s well enough carried out to do that.

Cardenio

On first hearing about it, it seemed to me that the reconstruction of a lost play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, via an eighteenth century text by “piddling Theobald” and company collaborations from a literal translation from Spanish, would be little more than a muddled, inconsistent hotchpotch.

I was wrong. Cardenio is gripping. It’s splendidly acted, beautifully costumed and extremely well paced. In fact the RSC has unearthed a new star and given the audience the pleasure of seeing two splendid young actresses.

Much of the plot has familiar early Jacobean features. Elder brother, Don Pedro, is a fine successor to his father as Duke while younger brother, Don Fernando, is a profligate who rapes  the farmer’s daughter, Dorotea, with whom he is obsessed,  but then betrays his friend, Cardenio, by threatening to rape the woman Cardenio loves, Luscinda, and then arranges to marry her. Cardenio goes mad, Luscinda hides in a convent and Dorotea runs off to find Ferdando. All is resolved at the end. Sort of.

Greg Doran enlivens the fast moving production with music and dances (very good they are, too) and some Spanish carnival elements including fireworks which make the audience jump.

Oliver Rix is superb as Cardenio. It’s hard to believe that this is his professional stage debut. Vocally rich and varied (I heard every word – unusual for me with my ageing ears), physically agile, fit chested (lots of  flesh to be seen) and brilliant in the mad scenes. No silly walks here. He is mentally ill, and convincingly. Lucy Briggs-Owen is very fine, too. She has lots to do and say and manages to project a range of emotions, mirrored in some beautiful movement. She also has the best dress you are likely to see this year. I was mightily impressed with Pippa Nixon as Dorotea, too. She has a ridiculously difficult role because she is the slighted woman who disguises herself as a boy in order to pursue the toad who promised to marry her. As Greg Doran says in the programme, it is very difficult for the audience to accept that she displays any sense in pursuing Fernando, especially as Alex Hassell plays him as an immoral shit bordering on the evil. It is even more difficult to believe it when she professes undying love for Fernando at the end, but there is something about this Dorotea that convinces. She is psychologically complex rather than a misguided fool.

I loved the ending of the play. The reconciliation scene is a hanky moment but the audience has mixed emotions, too, or at least I did. I tried at the time to explain Dorotea’s loyalty as some sort of religious allegory but I’m not sure this is right. It’s more like the typical Shakespearian ending where all seems happy but you’re left with things to think and worry about. In King Lear I am left dubious about Edgar’s whitewash speech at the end, in The Merchant of Venice I notice there is no happy solution for Antonio and in The Winter’s Tale I remember that Leontes’s son is still dead. This is the stuff that Shakespeare is made of.

Go see it.

You will get a warm welcome, too, at Moss Cottage if you do.

The Tempest in Stratford

Just occasionally theatre can deliver an experience which is sheer magic. It doesn’t happen all that often and sometimes the magic only lasts a brief while or in snatches.

Such is the case with two of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions which have opened the new theatre in Stratford. Kathryn Hunter produced all kinds of extraordinary magic in her performance of Cleopatra and, even though she has been replaced for the last performances ,there is still much to enjoy about the production. There is more magic in King Lear. Greg Hicks has grown in the part of Lear during the course of a long run and provides some quite wonderful moments, particularly with the incomparable Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester. The scene at the end where they meet up is very moving. So is the relationship between Gloucester and Poor Tom (played with great flexibility both physically and vocally by Charles Aitkin). Kelly Hunter as Goneril and Katy Stephens as Regan create hideously dynamic and powerful monsters, while John Mackay, most unusually, manages to make Albany interesting. There are interesting directorial decisions, too, which create their moments of magic for those who know the text well, such as that when the Fool (originally magnifiently played  by Kathryn Hunter and now ably presented by Sophie Russell) makes a clear decision not to follow Lear into the storm. Plenty of magic moments here.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. There is magic in the Swan Theatre these two weeks which lasts for an hour and a quarter and is not to be missed. It’s a production of The Tempest undertaken jointly by Little Angel Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. David Fielder plays Prospero and six other people play nine characters, a range of puppets,  six musical instruments and sing. It’s advertised as appropriate for ages 7+, but there’s also plenty for adults and Shakespeare fans.

From the moment when seagulls indicate a ship at sea and when Prospero creates the storm with his magic staff, to the return of the seagulls as the characters leave to board the ship at the end, you are held spellbound and delighted. Ariel and Caliban are puppets with their puppet masters providing their voices.

There are some fine performances. Prospero makes clear a huge range of emotions and reactions. Anneika Rose is stunning – beautiful, innocent, physically and vocally most impressive and coherent – as Miranda.

I laughed with delight a couple of times at the songs.  The kids in the audience (they were the majority and loved it) were shocked, horrified and delighted by Caliban and his antics. The adults were surprised that the text was not modernised and delighted by the amazingly slick character and costume changes.  Those who know stretches of the play by heart were surprised and delighted by the deft cutting and pasting of the text.  There are also some stunning textual interepretations, such as the ballgown costumes which entice Stephano and Trinculo turning  magically into threatening dogs and the banquet platters housing not food but  beasts. The plot was beautifully clear, the set, consisting of a ship’s hull/cave entrance/bower/chess room/seagull-perch, singers’ and players’ rostrum, a joy to look at.

I have not seen anything so delightful, skilful, slick and engaging for a long time.

If you’re coming to Stratford to see one of the big three, then stay the following morning and see The Tempest at 10:30. It’s a very short run; it’s on from tomorrow (Wednesday 15 March) until Saturday 26 March each day except Sundays at 10:30; today (Tuesday 15 March), Saturday 19 March, Tuesday 22 March, Thursday 24 March and Saturday 26 March at 1:30 and there’s one evening performance – Thursday 17 March at 7:30.

If you’re staying overnight stay that little bit longer to catch it next morning. If not, make a special jourrney.  

If you can’t get to Stratford  make sure you experience  it at Little Angel Theatre in London from 9 April to 15 May.

 And, of course, why not stay the night at Moss Cottage?

Peter Buckroyd

Hello,

As I have a new web site , kindly provided by David Steel at Stratford web designs, I thought I should tell you a little about my self and Moss Cottage. This also helps me get used to this world of blogs and the world wide web!

My name is William (but please call me Bill) Bruce, After working in engineering for 30 years in London, Kings Lynn and Swansea I was given the opportunity to start afresh in a whole new direction. Taking over Moss Cottage in September 2009 with no previous experience in the hospitality field was a somewhat daunting challenge. But one I have thoroughly enjoyed.

The most remarkable thing about running a bed and breakfast is that you realise there are so many wonderful, charming people in this world. I have had guests from all over the world and can genuinely say that people are the same the world over, happy to visit new areas and meet new people. Stratford-upon-Avon has proved to be a wonderful town to come to; the local people are the friendliest I’ve ever met; everyone has time for each other and happy to stop and chat to visitors.

Since taking over Moss Cottage I have gradually been able to make some changes. First to go were the small breakfast tables so that guests can now enjoy a leisurely breakfast and share their thoughts and experiences of Stratford-upon-Avon and the UK as a whole before starting their day. I have tried to create a warm environment so guests feel instantly at home, greeting new ones with  tea or real coffee and a slice of homemade cake after their drive. They can thus settle in while I explain what this charming town has to offer them during their stay.

Having recently joined a new local business association, I have found that this town has even more to it than meets the eye. From the wonders of Shakespeare and the RSC, the Ghost hunts, the river cruises, the small independent shops, it has something for everyone to enjoy.

I hope to continue to improve Moss Cottage as I want guests not only to enjoy their stay here but also to enjoy their stay in this wonderful town.  As one of our guests wrote in our guest book: “It’s so much better than a faceless corporate hotel”.

Thank you for reading this. Please keep checking back for new blogs on Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounding area.

Bill.