Travelling East

The travellers depart

Sally left me (for a while)
In February 2019 Sally set off to travel almost 2,000 miles away from Saltaire to Saint Petersburg in Russia. Then she’ll go a further 440 miles to Moscow, not to mention a further 3,790 milles to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and finally a further 725 miles to Beijing in China. Almost 5,000 miles in total….mostly by train…. All being well she’ll fly back home after her adventure of a lifetime, inspired by her pal Maggie’s dream to travel on the Trans-Siberian railway. Sometimes dreams come true. I’m holding the fort and experiencing the adventure by proxy via WhatsApp and texts.

To the East and back.... Amy's Japanese adventure, savoured by proxy

Big world, small world
In some ways the world is a small place, given that pictures and voices can travel almost instantaneously via cyber-routes. But in other ways, the distances between countries are still very great and geographical features still have to be traversed by foot, bicycle, car, train, boat, plane…. Maggie’s daughter, Amy, recently worked in Japan and brought back recipes (and prezzies) to expand my palate and tell tales that illuminated Japanese culture. The last time I experienced Sally leaving me for so many nights was when she completed her medical elective in Mysore, South India – that was about 5,000 miles away, as well….

Carpe Diem
But seizing the day is what it’s all about, I suppose. Birthdays, Easter, Bonfire Night, Armistice Day, Christmas, New Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, St George’s Day (aka Shakespeare’s birthday….) If an opportunity presents itself, as E M Forster declared in A Room with a View:

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

Memories are made of this.

The everlasting Yes
Sally said Yes to Maggie’s madcap dream and there they are, on the banks of the River Neva, visiting St Isaac’s cathedral and the Nevsky Prospect, attending the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre and downing several shots of vodka….

One element of this year's "birthday season" for Amy.... carpe diem! Declare the Everlasting YES!

When most I wink

Actual anniversary
Today is my Pearl Anniversary of being married to Sally on July 5th 1986. Thirty years, four houses, two daughters, and two careers later, we are celebrating by going out for a meal tonight. Over the weekend family and friends surrounded us but tonight we’ll be going it alone. Will we have enough to talk about after thirty years? I expect so.

Dud in the pit at Birmingham Hippodrome and afterwards in a Chinese restaurant

There are certain people….
People come and go in your life. Some are “little while” friends and some take root in unexpected ways. I met one such friend in 1979, before I’d met Sally, whose 1998 wedding in Italy I was honoured to attend (along with Sally, Emily and Harriet.) Dudley Phillips, for it is he, loves family, loves music, loves castles, loves reading, loves absurd humour, loves talking, loves listening, loves being quiet, loves eating, loves drinking, loves life – all loves I happily share. Our most recent meeting was prompted by his performance in the Colin Towns’ Mask Orchestra playing Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn music for David Bintley’s Shakespeare Suite for Birmingham Royal Ballet. Dud plays bass guitar thrummingly, dynamically and intricately, always supporting, always driving, always surprising.

Wink
The first piece, choreographed by Jessica Lang, was based on five Shakespeare’s sonnets read tenderly by Alfie Jones, taking as the starting point Sonnet 43 “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see….” The sonnet can be paraphrased something like the following, and it is as good an expression of friendship as I know:

When I’m asleep, then I see clearly
For during the day I look at things I don’t care about
When I sleep I dream of you.
Your image brightens the darkness of sleep
You brighten the dark
You even brighten the day
Things seem clearer when I think of you.
Day seems like night until I see you
During the night it seems like day when I dream about you.

Dudley Phillips on bass and Wink

A group of ten dancers twisted, turned and lifted through pairs, trios and groups expressing heartbreak, joy, loss, love and anger. A raw violin dominated the music by Jacob Ciupinski, aching with longing, longing with ache.
The Moor’s Pavane
José Limón’s riff on Othello was less abstract and set to stately music by Purcell. The four dancers representing Othello, Desdemona, Iago and Emilia presented a palpable sense of abusive love, smothering emotions and violent outbursts. The contrast between the regular pulse of the music and the discordant actions and reactions between the four performers was deeply disturbing.

The Moor's Pavane

The Shakespeare Suite
The final piece, the highlight, David Bintley’s The Shakespeare Suite, with Dudley’s bass playing, surprised and delighted with sassy variations on Shakespeare plays: a virtuoso Hamlet, a punky Taming of the Shrew, a quirky Richard III, a gothic Macbeth, a comically lusty Midsummer Night’s Dream, a troubling Othello and a lyrical Romeo and Juliet. Each pairing (Kate/Petruchio, Richard III/Lady Anne, Macbeth/Lady Macbeth, Titania/Bottom, Othello/Desdemona and Romeo/Juliet) was scored with a different mood and strangely captured the essence of the whole play without any words at all. Hamlet leapt alone but was surrounded by the other dancers in more abstract outfits symbolising different aspects of his personality (or so I thought….) The designs were startlingly bold (Costumes: Jasper Conran; Lighting: Peter Teigan and Steven Scott.) The Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn music was sexy, strutting, prowling and funny – switching and purring, changing and swinging as the pairings paraded. One of the best things I’ve seen (and heard) this year!

Loyal, Dependable, Non-judgemental, Honest, Open-hearted
A couple of lines that neatly capture my thoughts about Shakespeare (and Dudley….):

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end. (from Sonnet 30)

Nature and Fortune

....at thy birth, dear boy, Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great*
(*Constance in King John)
I know I’m not the only one becoming irrepressibly excited about the approaching 400th anniversary of a certain fellow’s death. In 1616 on April 23rd Mr William Shakespeare, gentleman, died in Warwickshire. The date of his death is recorded in two separate places, so the place and time of his death is undisputed. 52 years before that, in 1564, on April 26th he was baptised in Holy Trinity Church, in the same town where he died, Stratford-upon-Avon. Practice in Elizabethan and Jacobean Stratford was to baptise children three days after birth, so the conclusion is that Shakespeare died on his birthday. (Some recent scholars – see The Shakespeare Circle edited by Edmondson and Wells – have argued that a more likely birthdate was April 22nd but tradition is probably going to smother the scholarship for a few more decades, and, in any case, we’ll probably never know.)  So, let’s hear it for April 23rd – Shakespeare’s death date and, as near as dammit, his probable birthday.

St George and Cervantes
It’s a neat coincidence that April 23rd also happens to be the celebration day of England’s patron St George, dragon-slayer and rescuer of maidens. (Never mind that the historical equivalent of St George probably never set foot in England – he’s still a great symbol of manliness. I especially like his “voice” in the third stanza of Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem Not My Best Side which you can hear if you click this link to a youtube performance.) April 23rd is also the anniversary of the death of one of Spain’s greatest writers, Cervantes, whose character, Don Qixote, famously thought that the arms of a windmill were dragons that needed fighting. The Royal Shakespeare Company is currently staging Don Quixote in Stratford-upon-Avon and I’m looking forward to seeing it with the great David Threlfall later this year.

Main pic: David Threlfall and Roger Rees in the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby

The most prolific imdb credits in history
The Internet Movie Database (today 8th April 2016) credits Shakespeare as a writer 1,148 times, a record that will probably never be beaten and with a script-writing tally that will no doubt keep rising. It’s especially remarkable that the movie industry began 300 years after Shakespeare died. (I suppose the cynic in me can say that his work is used so often because there are no writer’s fees to pay….) He has also inspired many other artists to create ballets, operas and musicals.

Giving the Monarchy a run for its money….
In 2013 the English Tourist Board calculated that Shakespeare tourism accounted for upwards of £600,000,000 per year. Shakespeare-related merchandise and branding is (laughably) everywhere in Warwickshire – with coffee shops, bookshops, restaurants, bed and breakfast accommodation, photographs, paintings, sculptures, posters, pens, fridge magnets, lunch boxes, mugs, t-shirts, soft toys and diverse other “unconsidered trifles”, great and small. Thousands have made tidy profits from Shakespeare without ever producing one of his plays or reading aloud one of his poems. The impact of Shakespeare’s work on the economy of the country is definitely worth celebrating so I, for one, am looking forward to the anniversary events.