Sam's first Secret Santa weekend

December treats

It's tradition we go to Badby for a Secret Santa weekend every year and 2023 saw the Allard-Baker-Grimley-Johnson-Thompson numbers swelled by one.... not a very big or old one but a significant one in our lives at the moment.

Talking Shakespeare Kaksi (Two)

Like a potter’s wheel (Coasters, Stockings and Nativities)

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel:

I know not where I am, nor what I do.

The valiant Talbot’s words in Henry VI Part One are a potent reflection of what my mind has felt like during 2020. At times, the effects of the pandemic (on me) have produced clarity, joy and hope but more often confusion, frustration and despair (the negative emotions mostly caused by the UK government, I have to say.) Time has seemed elastic so pre-Covid times feels like two months ago and also two years ago. 

• Local walks continue on most days,
• jigsaws keep the left brain/right brain synapses twanging,
• freshly-baked mulled wine and mince pies have now been sampled and
• posh takeaways from La Rue restaurant provide a once-a-week luxury oasis, providing a time to scrub down, dress up and light candles.

Whatever it takes to cope in this strangest of times…. In the collage below there is evidence that our Advent Stockings (from Sue) have continued to yield treasures at morning coffee time. You can also see the creative endeavours of our Badby friend, Alex Thompson, honorary daughter and sister to the Allard-Johnsons, who has used some of her time at least to design beautiful coasters. These are all evidence of “clarity, joy and hope” – as is the glimpse of an ambitious Nativity scene (see collage above) constructed in a neighbour’s garden, along with child-friendly story sheets telling of those days in May or September (likely) between 4 and 6 BC (probably) when a stable in Bethlehem became the centre of the universe. The centre of my imaginative universe at the moment is re-reading, re-listening to and re-watching Shakespeare plays – it stops my thoughts whirling and helps me avoid becoming frustrated by the news bulletins. I introduced the RSC Talking Shakespeare series in an earlier post (here). PS Kaksi is Finnish for Two so the information below is my record of the second “batch” I enjoyed.

Paterson Joseph and Sir Simon Russell Beale

• Paterson Joseph almost became a chef before turning to acting. All of the interviewees were asked about their earliest introductions to the national poet and Paterson Joseph delivered a classic line that chimed with my own experience: “I didn’t come to Shakespeare – Shakespeare came to me.” I first “noticed” Joseph in 1990 as Oswald in King Lear, and suddenly realised – because of his performance – what a brilliant and significant role Oswald is. I was also lucky to see his shattering Othello (with the evillest Iago I’ve seen in Andy Serkis) at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I loved Joseph’s Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida and, most jaw-droppingly, his tormented Brutus (pitted against Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony) in Julius Caesar. He didn’t talk about his many non-Shakespearean roles (including the recent Kamal Hadley in the BBC’s Noughts and Crosses and one of my favourites, his role in Survivors; plus on stage his compelling Atahualpa in Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre) but then the point of the series is to talk about Shakespeare and I’ll never forget the Channel 4 documentary in which he directed a group of disaffected teenagers in London in a moving production of Romeo and Juliet.
• Simon Russell Beale first exploded into my theatrical knowledge in a series of Restoration plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company playing gut-wrenching comic grotesques with painful vulnerabilities. He has spoken to the RSC Summer School a couple of times and it became obvious that comedy was not his only skill. Seeing him in Ghosts and The Seagull made it clear that he was “one of the greats.” He extracted every moment of impact from his appearances as Edgar in King Lear and his Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was truly disgusting. Then as a toad-like Richard III, an extremely strange Ariel in The Tempest and (at the Donmar) a heart-breakingly buttoned-up, pinched and pained Malvolio from Twelfth Night it became clear he could tackle anything Shakespeare wrote with clarity, intelligence and heart. He triumphed at the National with Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet and surprised (inevitably) with his Cassius in Julius Caesar and Macbeth at the Almeida. I thought he was tremendous as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic but it was his Timon in Timon of Athens at the National (and broadcast to cinemas) that blew me away, reinventing the play anew as a Play for Today in these no-such-thing-as-society Thatcherite times. Of course he’s done Falstaff on TV (a more vicious one than usual) and (brilliantly) King Lear himself at the National. But his Prospero, on his return to the RSC, in a multimedia Tempest was a revelation – here was a guilty Prospero, as tormented as Ariel and Caliban, struggling to forgive himself never mind anyone else and finally breaking the audience’s hearts as he parted from the island.

Paterson Joseph in Julius Caesar, Othello, Noughts and Crosses, Royal Hunt of the Sun, Simon Russell Beale in The Tempest (as both Ariel and Prospero), The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida (with Paterson Joseph), Juliet Stevenson in Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Truly Madly Deeply, Troilus and Cressida, Antony Sher in King Lear (as both The Fool and King Lear), Falstaff and Richard III

Juliet Stevenson and Sir Antony Sher

• Juliet Stevenson confided that she peed on stage during a spear-carrier scene (alongside Ruby Wax) in her first appearance at the RSC in a production of The Tempest. She paid tribute to early mentors in her acting career (well known like Peter Brook and less well known like David Perry) – sometimes by saying or doing things that she reacted against. Her insights into language and space were marvellous to hear as she discussed in detail her approach to Isabella in Measure for Measure, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Rosalind in As You Like It. The season in which she played the latter two roles was a significant one for me as I was living in Stratford-upon-Avon during that year teaching English as a Foreign Language to groups of adults who I would accompany to the theatre so I saw those two productions a great number of times, each time spotting more and more depth and detail, especially in Stevenson’s performances. Of course in later years I got to know her screen work such as Truly, Madly, Deeply and Life Story in which she played Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
• (Sir) Antony Sher, one of the most powerful presences I’ve seen on stage in plays like Tartuffe and Tamburlaine the Great, had a plethora of breakthrough roles to discuss, not to mention aspects of his own biography (growing up a Lithuanian-Jew in South Africa, being gay and working at the Liverpool Playhouse.) His famous Richard III (on crutches with a prosthetic back), Shylock (in Merchant of Venice), Titus Andronicus (in a production which started in South Africa where audiences were unsurprised by the anarchic violence in the play which was given a contemporary political context), Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (where he researched and brilliantly portrayed the psychological condition of morbid jealousy), and the warrior-like Macbeth, in a Swan production that he and Harriet Walter infused with a palpable and terrifying sense of panic - all these performances were memorable and mesmerising. In recent years he famously portrayed Falstaff with equal doses of bonhomie and arrogant cruelty in the History sequence of Henry IV and a monumental King Lear arriving on an elevated wheely-throne.

Greg Doran Talking Shakespeare with Paterson Joseph, Simon Russell Beale, Antony Sher and Juliet Stevenson

Pumpkin Trail to Bolsover

The Pumpkin Trail
It’s Autumn:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.…

(sonnet 73)
People who know me, know I love Autumn: a fresh start for the new academic term (still feel it even after retiring from teaching); birthday month; ravishing colours in the world outside; wearing jumpers; lighting fires; wandering along the atmospheric Pumpkin Trail at Bolton Abbey estate (pictures above and below)

Metaphor of Autumn
The traditional poetic view of Autumn is that it represents the dying of the year, the Autumn of life, the descent into decay and transition towards Death…. Winter is coming.  I agree there’s something in the metaphor, though my Libran Pollyanna rose-tinted specs also sees and feels the following:

• Autumn leads to Advent to Winter to Christmas to New Year and it finally leads to Spring = good;
• the Autumn colours red, burgundy, purple, gold, orange, yellow, green, brown and beige scattered across a landscape = good;
• falling leaves like nature’s confetti = good;
• warmth of a real (controlled) fire = good;
• Bonfire Night and fireworks = good;
• cosy knitwear = good;
• snuggled up indoors, hunkering down with food, drink and TV = good 

Golden Age of TV?
Everybody has an opinion about pinpointing the golden age of TV. In the 1960s I was breathless with excitement at the cliffhangers at the end of each Batman episode and had many a dream of Cathy Gale and Emma Peel in The Avengers. Was anybody as thrilled as me in the 1970s at being allowed to (once a week) stay up and watch Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R or Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius? Or the camp excesses of Dynasty or the stately poignancy of Brideshead Revisited in the 1980s? Was the 1990s the Golden Age with the first run of (weekly) showings of Friends or the weird compulsive cult of (the first season of) Twin Peaks? I could keep going, but it’s clear to me that this Autumn, in Covid Full-Semi-or-Partial-Lockdown, I’m grateful that there is so much choice on TV that it is easy to find something to while away the hours, conversing with the flowers, consulting with the bees. No such thing as a Golden Age since creative talents have always produced good stuff, but today there is a (happy) glut of choice.

How can all these things happen to just one person? 
My “birthday season” viewing has included the glorious 1938 Bringing Up Baby (from which the sub-heading above is one of a hundred quotable lines) with the astonishing Katherine Hepburn at the top of her game, and Cary Grant in one of his finest unfettered performances. I also chose to watch Tom & Kelly & Val & Anthony & Tom taking breaths away in the retro jetplane-porn of 1986’s Top Gun. And for binge-watching I'm watching Goose from Top Gun (that’s Anthony Edwards aka Mark Greene) leading the ensemble cast of the early seasons of ahead-of-its-time ER; but as a bedtime digestif, to reassure myself that everyone can adapt to change, I like to visit Schitt’s Creek, where Moira is proving to be my touchstone of taste and dignity….

Jigsaws, Meals out, Walks
I continue to puzzle through Autumn. For me, jigsaws have been a lifelong activity, not just a lockdown one. And Katherine Hepburn appears on my current jigsaw with Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter along with my own face and snapshots of selected loved ones from “The Harry Potter Film Club” and beyond. Above also features snaps of The Terrace in Saltaire, another local venue for lovely grub. And below our socially distanced birthday walk with our adopted family from Badby, this time meeting at Bolsover Castle for a wet and misty meander through muddy Derbyshire.

Rose-briar and holly-tree

Garden meets, afternoon tea, Hardwick Hall
Our back yard, with its acer tree and pots of paradise, has been a godsend during 2020 on days when it’s been possible to sit with family and friends, like Sue and Brian, on hot afternoons or warm evenings. As cafés opened, we booked our local afternoon tea (a birthday present for Sally) at the charming 1920s-themed Interlude Tea Room. And we drove down the motorway (first time in six months) to reconnect with our Badby second-family, the Thompsons, at Hardwick Hall – for a picnic and walks round the grounds at any rate.

Venturing Out and Locking Down Again
The Living-With-Covid world is a volatile experience, especially if, like me, you live in a place which experiences a sudden local lockdown. The news arrived that Bradford was experiencing “a spike” right in the middle of a soon-to-be-illegal gathering (if I fully understood the details right of what can happen in which setting and with how many bubbles of people….) Seven months ago, this kind of language and thought would have seemed to be straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But here we are, trying to make sense of international, national, local, family and personal responses to the 2020 pandemic.

Every rose has a thorn, holly stays evergreen
Reading poetry has been a perfect activity in lockdown: many poems are short and they distill an aspect of human existence in an intense package of imaginative sound. Recently I revisited Emily Brontë’s 1846 riff on the fickle nature of love (in the first flush of love we often neglect our friends) and the enduring nature of friendship (still shiny in the depths of winter when love has faded.) I’m lucky that I married someone after three years of friendship so I feel the poem contains a truth – that we should not take our friends for granted – that I hope I’ve not abused over the years.

Love and Friendship by Emily Brontë

Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree –
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He still may leave thy garland green.

Around the World at Christmas

Around the World

The world is a big place – and in some ways a small place – and a marvellously diverse place. As I’ve said before, home is where the heart is. By the end of 2020 the UK will have “Brexited” whatever that might mean, deal or no deal, with full sovereignty or, more likely, the illusion of sovereignty. The rich of England will continue to get rich, whoever pulls the invisible purse strings. In the meantime, one pair who I usually spend time with in the Festive season went off to Europe on a train (see central image above – Amy and Maggie on a sledge not a train at that point.)  This past Christmas season, home was Badby, home was Saltaire and home was Around the World in Christmas-themed displays at Chatsworth House….

“I think I might be different, I might not be the same.”

Michael cooked up a feast or two in Badby (and Janet and Alex turned their hands to a gingerbread house.) This year’s Royal Shakespeare Company Christmas show was only tenuously Christmassy, but it had a very witty set, enthusiastic performers and very jolly songs, though one (If I don’t cry) made my eyes moist…. David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress has been adapted by Mark Ravenhill with songs by Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers and Chris Heath. The main character, Dennis, sings of being Ordinary but by the end he is anything but – he’s extraordinary – and the message, I thought, was all about the intrinsic value of individual differences – an apt reminder in this most divided of eras. 

Sparkle round the globe

The differences between Morocco, China, Japan, India, Portugal, Italy and America were celebrated in exuberant style at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire this year. Some of the differences were artistic and involved traditional (stereotyped?) imagery but some of the displays were harder to spot: Venetian masks, the Russian dolls on the huge Christmas tree in the Painted Hall, and the Nativity scene in the baroque Portuguese-inspired chapel.

“It’s really useful to travel, if you want to see new things.” (Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days)

Quirky nods to fictional traveller Phileas Fogg and historical aviator Amelia Earhart guided you through imaginatively lit rooms containing hidden and not-so-hidden delights, like the Chinese lanterns and paper dragons. Floating candles hovered around the Nativity in the Chapel, warding away Damien Hirst’s Exquisite Pain statue of Saint Bartholomew.

Cherry Blossom

Probably my favourite display was in the Japanese-themed room, partly because it was a potent reminder of Spring in the dark days of Winter.

Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa

A calligraphy desk, paper fans and more blossoms framed 3d art work reminiscent of Hokusai’s Nineteenth Century woodblock print Kanagawa-oki Nami Ura.

Effortless glory

Staff at Chatsworth apparently unite from the middle of Summer onwards to prepare for the Christmas displays and it certainly impresses with thousands of baubles, wreaths, swags and greenery. I particularly like the charming homemade smaller items that appear when you have time to stop and stare.

Decking the Hall

It’s impossible to walk around grand Christmas decorations without Christmas carols ear-worming into your subconscious and I was amused to read about the two variations of Deck the Halls 

Deck the hall with boughs of holly,

Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

'Tis the season to be jolly, (Fa….!)

Fill the meadcup, drain the barrel, (Fa….!)

Troll the ancient Christmas carol (Fa….!)

See the flowing bowl before us, (Fa….!)

Strike the harp and join the chorus. (Fa….!)

Follow me in merry measure, (Fa….!)

While I sing of beauty's treasure. (Fa….!)

Fast away the old year passes, (Fa….!)

Hail the new, ye lads and lasses! (Fa….!)

Laughing, quaffing all together, (Fa….!)

Heedless of the wind and weather. (Fa….!)

Censorship of meadcup, barrel, bowl and quaffing

The tune may well go back to medieval times and the original lyrics were in Welsh, with the variation above appearing in 1862, the lyrics being attributed to Scottish musician, Thomas Oliphant. In Chatsworth’s gift shop I learned that the Pennsylvania School Journal attempted to rewrite the lyrics changing all the references to getting drunk:

Deck the hall with boughs of holly,

'Tis the season to be jolly,

Don we now our gay apparel,

Troll the ancient Christmas carol,

See the blazing yule before us,

Strike the harp and join the chorus.

Follow me in merry measure,

While I tell of Christmas treasure.

Fast away the old year passes,

Hail the new, ye lads and lasses!

Sing we joyous all together,

Heedless of the wind and weather.

Soft bosoms

Even the quaffing version of Deck The Halls is a dilution of the Seventeenth Century version which celebrates bosoms and blisses and kisses – and why not? It’s Christmas, after all.

Oh! How soft my fair one’s bosom 

Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

Oh! How sweet the grove in blossom (Fa….!)

Oh! How blessed are the blisses (Fa….!)

Words of love, and mutual kisses

Fa, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!

Sustainable Christmas

Sustainable Christmas Decorations
Last year (pictures click here) we made a pilgrimage to the different Christmas decorations in Burton Agnes Hall, Chatsworth House and Harewood House. We return to Burton Agnes as often as we can for two reasons: the Hall and Gardens are beautiful, and the Cunliffe-Lister family marshall friends and colleagues to create very distinctive decorations, sometimes hand-knitted, sometimes using folded paper; often using foliage from the grounds to mount the displays and this year there was a focus on sustainable decorations.

Friendly staff and welcoming atmosphere
Often the room guides can point out their own individual contribution so there is a team-spirit and homemade feel to the Burton Agnes Christmas celebrations. This year snowmen were “hiding” in every room for the eagle-eyed and I was glad to see the local primary school’s regular contribution, this year made of recycled items (in top picture above.) Our Christmas Crackers this year are recyclable and homemade and presents are wrapped in old paper or newspaper. Every step, they say, is a step in the right direction….

Next Christmas….
The Hall dates from 1598 and there are three features that impress me every time I visit: the Great Hall is awe-inspiring; the Oak Staircase is a marvel of engineering and restoration; and the Long Gallery at the top of the house is perfect for “taking a turn about the room” with its curved ceiling. I’m already looking forward to visiting next Christmas. Meanwhile, here are my immediate families' four trees: two in Bradford, one in Leeds, one in Badby...

Great British Secret Santa

Merry Christmas, Mr Scrooge

In the bottom left of the above collage is the RSC Christmas tree. In recent times, it has become a tradition to visit our second home in Badby in December (not to mention many other times in the year) for a “Secret Santa” weekend and include a visit to whatever the Royal Shakespeare Company are staging as their Christmas show.

Want and Ignorance

This year the RSC staged A Christmas Carol, a David Edgar adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel. Aiden Gillet was a volatile, vulnerable Ebenezer Scrooge (played in the same production last year by the snarly and ultimately adorable Phil Davis.) Joseph Timms played an energetic, angry and moving Charles Dickens whose efforts to write a story about Want and Ignorance conflicted with his publishers’ desire to give the public a heartwarming comical tale.

Plenty and Enough

It seems perverse and hypocritical in some ways to delve into Dickens’s world of sympathy for the vulnerable and yet enjoy and celebrate my own wonderful Plenty – plenty presents, plenty treats, plenty food, plenty drink…. But that’s the Way of the World. Take action when you can; give where you feel able; have compassion always.

Blenheim Palace

The unusual thing we did this year was attend the Blenheim Palace Illuminated Lights Walk, a busy but magical experience. There were extraordinary colour-changing waterfalls of light, neon tunnels, fairy trails and aerial poppy-themed paths.

Bright Lights for Winter Nights 

Penguins, Snowmen, Bridges, Chalets, a Gingerbread House, a giant Lotus on the lake, tree trunks looking like pantomime stage sets and bulb after bulb flooding the winter night with colour sensations.

Inveruel, Colintraive

Harriet, Chris, Emily, Sally and me in September, north of Hadrian's Wall....

Home from home
Regular readers will know there are (currently) three other spots in the UK where I feel “at home” other than Yorkshire:

• Badby/Stratford-upon-Avon/the Cotswolds
• Northumberland (especially the coast)
• and Scotland.

So, in September, it was a deep pleasure to visit another Scottish spot we’ve never been to – Colintraive, near Dunoon on the Cowal Peninsula – miles from the nearest shop and hunkered down in a house called Inveruel overlooking Loch Riddon.

Inveruel, Colintraive, lovely house with views and visiting sheep....

Test of a holiday
In our retired state (mindful of budgets) the test of any holiday is that the place we stay has to be as nice or nicer than our own home. Inveruel exceeded expectations: well-designed, with oak floors, plenty of space for spreading out to relax, read, do jigsaws, eat, drink, sleep and strip off muddy boots and coats from hearty walks.

Rooms with a View or two
It also had lovely views. And it was easy to feel Gatsby-like and imagine the lights over the loch belonged to mysterious celebrities. The nights were dark, the stars were out, the moon was bright and the next few blogs will have pictures of what we did during the week….

Plenty of atmosphere and chances to star-gaze as the sun went down....

What sport shall we devise here in this garden?

Sally, Emily, Michael, Alex and Janet at Hidcote

“our sea-walled garden, the whole land….”
Shakespeare famously used gardening as a metaphor for how to conduct your life: seeding, planting, tending, nurturing, weeding, watering, pruning, feeding, trimming, harvesting, composting, laying fallow.... And he presents England as a giant garden that needs the same treatment. John O'Gaunt used his "royal throne of kings" speech to cement the idea, referencing "this sceptred isle....this earth of majesty....this other Eden, this demi-paradise....this precious stone....this dear, dear land...." Most people forget that the speech leads up to the concept that this gorgeous land is now being run by rich landlords who have effectively destroyed the country from within - hello, Conservative party - (my post-Brexit analysis of the speech - here - remains the same.)

The bees and butterflies fluttering by
In the muddled, topsy-turvy, venal, lie-ridden road to Brexit, life for ordinary peasants goes on (yes, I am a committed Remoaner and proud of it and yes, if you are a Brexiter, I hope you're right and life's going to be lovely but don't bleat about how it's the EU's fault that they're protecting their own interests - of course they are, you numpties, and quite right too, just as we should but we're the ones leaving - and let me know what you imagined would happen with Ireland and fruit-picking and visas and nationals living abroad....) but, this post has such pretty pictures that I'm going to bury the politics and concentrate on what a lovely day it was at Hidcote because life goes on.... the peasants continue to till the land (literally and metaphorically).... Michael will still provide magnificent picnics on the ground in the orchard in order to keep his and my family nourished amongst the whips and scorns of life. And, dodging showers on sultry summer days, we will still find time to answer the Queen's question in Richard II:

What sport shall we devise here in this garden
To drive away the heavy thought of care?

We could while away the hours conversing with the flowers....

Hidcote
Hidcote is a lovely National Trust Arts and Crafts garden created by the horticulturist, Major Lawrence Johnstone. The effect is of wandering through a series of "rooms" in the open air as all the different areas feel like you've entered a new space. The queen and her lady (in Richard II that is) overhear two gardeners chuntering in iambic pentameter, wondering why they should bother to "keep law and form and due proportion" when "the whole land is full of weeds."

O, what a pity is it

That (the king) had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land

As we this garden!

There is so much goodness in the hearts of ordinary people, it is important to spend times wandering the highways and byways of the land - and wiling away the hours in places like Hidcote - to remember that the news onslaught is not the only story. We need time to smell the roses and forget the king.

Back to Joyce's for home-made buns....

Summer's Lease

Alex's afternoon tea and Morris Dancers in Badby

The world’s mine oyster
I’ve written elsewhere (see here) about how some places that are not officially home can feel like home. And so it was that August’s end contained a family visit to collect me from my week of bachelor vice…. the vice of glutting…. glutting on productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and soaking up interesting views by leading academics and theatre-makers at the annual RSC summer school. My first attendance at this event was in 1986, the year The Swan theatre opened and, although I haven’t been every single year, I’ve been more often than not. 32 years ago I was one of the whippersnappers and now I blend in seamlessly with the silver-haired and reverend Shakespeare fanatics.

RSC summer school and the 2018 Macbeth

Something Wicked This Way Comes
You need afternoon tea (thank you, Alex!) and the English/Moorish oddities of Morris Dancers tinkling their bells after such a marathon experience. After descending into the maelstrom of darkness that was a Time-dripping creepy Macbeth with Niamh Cusack, Christopher Eccleston, Edward Bennett, Luke Newberry, Michael Hodgson as Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Macduff, Malcolm and the Porter. After hearing challenging views about Macbeth and other plays and hearing from actors, including Alexandra Gilbreath who reflected on her previous performances and performed alternative versions of speeches.

2018 Romeo and Juliet to die for and Merry Wives of Windsor relocated to Essex

The Long and the Short of it
I thought Romeo and Juliet was a fine production, a believably youthful portrayal of the madness of early love (Karen Fishwick and Bally Gill) and performances by Andrew French and Ishia Bennison as Friar Lawrence and The Nurse that revealed their charismatic attractiveness but awful culpability in the tragedy that unfolds. The Merry Wives of Windsor was a different TOWIE kettle of fish – anchored by Ishia Bennison (again, as Mistress Quickly), Beth Cordingly, Rebecca Lacey and Jonathan Cullen as Mistress Ford, Mistress Page and Dr Caius but (happily for me) dominated by David Troughton’s Sir John Falstaff. There were more laughs than there probably should have been because of the skills of the actors (and the stunning Lez Brotherston’s set and costume designs) – but there will be other productions of this extraordinary play in years to come. A fitting quotation for both Romeo and Juliet and Merry Wives of Windsor is one of my favourite Shakespeare lines, a bit lost in the cartoon-world of this enjoyably shallow production:

O powerful Love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast.

Tamburlaine the Great, the play that unleashed Marlowe's mighty line

To be direct and honest is not safe
And so to Tamburlaine the Great, Marlowe’s two plays wrestled into one evening by ex-artistic director Michael Boyd with career-boosting performances by Jude Owusu and Rosy McEwan as Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. This was a hypnotic, careful, terrifying ensemble production with stunning music (James Jones) and evocative designs (Tom Piper with lighting by Colin Grenfell) and the whole cast should be applauded for their commitment to bringing the “scourge of the world” to full realisation. As if the RSC summer school glut of productions was not enough, I then indulged with Michael, my Shakespeare buddy, in a double-bill visit to Shakepeare’s Globe on London's South Bank to see strong productions of The Winter’s Tale and Othello. I’m often criticised for being too positive about life and always seeing the good in things – but although there were things I could carp about (certain lines, certain moments, certain perverse decisions) I always remember what it’s like to stage a production (in my 32 years of teaching) and try to appreciate at least what they were trying to do. (Hard to forgive the shit bear! in Winter’s Tale – but a pure revelation (to me) to have a black Michael Cassio in Othello. Mark Rylance, of course, was a devastatingly affable and disingenuous Iago – and I genuinely mourned the loss to the world at the death of André Holland’s Othello.

London's South Bank and Othello and The Winter's Tale

Exciting times

July memories with Harriet, Chris, Emily, Alex from Badby, Sally and random daleks

That was July and this is August
Yes, another brief blog, but, then again, loved ones tell me some people only look at the pictures anyway…. which is fine. So, yes, the 2018 summer heatwave continues (gorgeous weather or the beginning of our planet’s final descent into a cosmic inferno of global warming? Who knows? Time will tell.) My eldest daughter celebrated her July birthday in fine style in beautiful places and doing cool things and is plotting the next stage of her life (what will happen? Who knows? Time will tell.) I’ve been revisiting my past notes on Merry Wives of Windsor and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays in anticipation of this year’s Royal Shakespeare Company Summer School (my manly vice.) And I’ve been receiving feedback from my beta readers (thank you, all) on the (6th ? draft) of Raydan Wakes, the first book in the trilogy Rhenium Tales on which I’m doing my final feedback-fuelled revisions. Plots for all three books are sewn up, the website is almost ready to be released to the world, so that’s one item on the bucket list that can be ticked off. (Will an agent champion it? Who knows? Time will tell.) Exciting times.

top page of the soon-to-be-released website about my trilogy....