Day 24 Stratford (Wednesday 11 April)
So, I have just done something to lose the several paras I had written, closing Word. Bah. Trying again and saving more often.
My hotel is your standard large Stratford house, with just a few rooms for guests on the first floor. I'm in one of the two singles at the back (the other is unoccupied, so I have the bathroom to myself). While it could use some modernisation/redecoration - by the looks it's been a B&B, or "hotel", if one wishes to be pretentious - for a lot longer than my landlady's been alive - it has had double-glazing fitted upstairs, which keeps out both weather and noise. Though I think it would be very quiet even without, here at the back. Not a single reminder of other guests or passers-by or traffic. And very likely they're not disturbed by my coughing, either.
It also has the yards of coloured prints on the walls typical of the species - in this case, lots of pretty girls in exiguous "Roman" costume by Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, interspersed disconcertingly with 18th black and white theatre scene prints and modern landscape/flower pictures. And elaborate lights that don't get switched on at night. And ornaments. Everywhere. Either Russians from Latvia have tastes identical to your standard issue English landlady, or she inherited/took over a going concern. If it was me, I'd sweep the lot into the rubbish bin: all that dusting! As it is she's ironing at all hours.
Yesterday I had a lovely quiet morning, with breakfast at 8:30. I'd opted for that thinking that I might sleep in after having been to the theatre. Ha. Up at 6 am as usual. It was a fairly standard B&B breakfast, but at a nicely-set table of my own, in a quiet comfortable room (apart from the ornaments - there are two busts of Beethoven on the mantelpiece!). I appreciated that, after dodging my London hotel's cattle class breakfast room for most of three weeks.
Then I asked for a decent sized bath towel (the one in the room was fractionally bigger than a hand towel), and later had a shower and washed my hair - before noon, as I gather the hot water etc gets turned off at check-out time.
Just after noon I sallied out, having noticed my box of tissues was getting suspiciously low. I also wanted to look at a second hand bookshop I'd seen in Rother St, just off the market area. Alas, I couldn't summon interest in looking through the books when I got there, though it was both large and well organised.
I walked down the main street: Wood St then Bridge St (Stratford-upon-Avon streets tend to change names every block - it makes it easy to specify where a place is, and hard to find it). Lots of shops for both tourists and locals. A sample of my bus to Birmingham was waiting at the upper bus stop before starting its return run: a flash looking double-decker, in yellow and blue livery, with its route number painted large on front and sides: very different from the old wreck I came here in four or five years ago.
Aha! A tea shop. A real tea shop (naturally called The Real Tea café), selling not just black and green teas, but white and blue and "infusions" (never heard of blue tea before; somewhere between black and green, apparently). So I did what all old ladies with time on their hands do: I went in and ordered a coffee and a scone with jam and cream, then sat down, and took my time enjoying them (reading Vorkosiverse slash fanfic on my PDA the while, in case you were worried I was reverting too far to type). It was raining, after all (lightly, but visibly - no umbrellas in sight, though). Not by the time I left.
Then I went to Boots, and bought a bigger box of tissues. And checked through both Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencers, to find out where they keep the yoghurt, as I shall have to get some on my way to the bus on Saturday, and didn't want to be searching the shop with a heavy bag in tow.
That was quite enough of an excursion, so I went back to the hotel and got comfortable again, and tried to have a pre-theatre sleep (no luck there).
Not the fault of the production that I was miserable, though for quite some time I did wonder whether I shouldn't have stayed in bed for that, too. Probably not my worst ever night, but usually when I'm that sick I don't have to keep quiet about it. I wasn't the only person having difficulty not coughing (which was good, in a weird way, because it was quite embarrassing enough doing it, but doing it conspicuously alone? Eek). Worst, though, was not being able to blow my nose. I thought I was going to choke to death. At least continuous use of Strepsils suppressed most of the coughing impulse.
Moving right along from that glimpse of TMI to the production. This was The Tempest, the first of a set of three plays focussing on castaways, isolation, and consequent revelations, done with the same casts. (The others are Twelfth Night and what I persist in thinking of as Two Gentlemen of Ephesus, but which is really called The Comedy of Errors.)
In the advertising material they'd carefully refrained from saying these were modern dress productions (more or less modern dress; a lot of surrealist demi-Elizabethan dress for the non-human characters). Since the theatre was extensively remodelled over two summers, the interior is unmistakably a reflection of the London Globe Theatre, with a stage protruding well into the audience, and seats and galleries around ¾ of the round (octagonal) wall space. Which, as one audience member discontentedly observed, meant there wasn't room for scenery. They made do, believe me, with a stage floor canted fancifully in all directions, including up at the back, and incorporating the front part of a sometimes see-through glass/perspex/who knows cube which represented everything from the deck of the wrecking ship to Prospero's cell.
At first I wasn't very happy with all this (nor with the fact that Prospero, speaking to all parts of the house, and quietly, was sometimes very hard to follow). Miranda's part is a nithing's, but the actress did her best with girlish faith in daddy and astonished delight in other people finally appearing and instant love for Ferdinand. But things got under way at last, and both the evil intrigues and the low comedy (also evil intrigues) were well done.
I was confused at first by Ferdinand being played by a black man, wondering if this too were a message, but when his father the king came on, a middle aged white man, I decided they'd just picked a romantic lead for Miranda to react to. They also had the king's murderous brother played by a woman, with minimal amendments to the text; she did valiantly, and provided some entertainment with her sharp tongue. More acceptable, in a way, from a woman, reflecting less of Sebastian's sense of having been done out of something, since, as a woman, guess what, she is a second class citizen. A good deal of the time Ariel was a dead ringer for Prospero, which made sense in a weird way, showng the fluidity of the spirit's conception of self. So, you know, anything could have happened.
I didn't like Prospero, but if you read what everybody in the play says carefully, that's not surprising; he's a selfish pig with an anger management problem. Goodness knows how Ferdinand and Miranda are going to cope with being king and queen of Naples, since Ferdinand appears to be an ass as well as nearly as naïve as Miranda. Maybe the sister/brother Sebastian, having had a kick up the conscience, could be got on side to provide a leavening of practicality.
On the whole I enjoyed the production. I didn't enjoy the physical aspects of the night, but that discomfort will recede. Some time.
Forty years ago the programs were better. Just saying. Not buying another.
It was extremely cold walking back to the hotel (though it's only ten minutes), and I was wishing I'd remembered my pashmina to wrap around my throat - and possibly even a second sweat shirt to wear under my rain jacket. I warmed up smartly enough once in my room, though.
I finish with a close-up of another couple's guest room this morning - doors left open, no sign of them, goodness knows where they were! I thought this was confined to fiction.
High life - I can't get this to go into the post, but you can click on the link.
My hotel is your standard large Stratford house, with just a few rooms for guests on the first floor. I'm in one of the two singles at the back (the other is unoccupied, so I have the bathroom to myself). While it could use some modernisation/redecoration - by the looks it's been a B&B, or "hotel", if one wishes to be pretentious - for a lot longer than my landlady's been alive - it has had double-glazing fitted upstairs, which keeps out both weather and noise. Though I think it would be very quiet even without, here at the back. Not a single reminder of other guests or passers-by or traffic. And very likely they're not disturbed by my coughing, either.
It also has the yards of coloured prints on the walls typical of the species - in this case, lots of pretty girls in exiguous "Roman" costume by Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, interspersed disconcertingly with 18th black and white theatre scene prints and modern landscape/flower pictures. And elaborate lights that don't get switched on at night. And ornaments. Everywhere. Either Russians from Latvia have tastes identical to your standard issue English landlady, or she inherited/took over a going concern. If it was me, I'd sweep the lot into the rubbish bin: all that dusting! As it is she's ironing at all hours.
Yesterday I had a lovely quiet morning, with breakfast at 8:30. I'd opted for that thinking that I might sleep in after having been to the theatre. Ha. Up at 6 am as usual. It was a fairly standard B&B breakfast, but at a nicely-set table of my own, in a quiet comfortable room (apart from the ornaments - there are two busts of Beethoven on the mantelpiece!). I appreciated that, after dodging my London hotel's cattle class breakfast room for most of three weeks.
Then I asked for a decent sized bath towel (the one in the room was fractionally bigger than a hand towel), and later had a shower and washed my hair - before noon, as I gather the hot water etc gets turned off at check-out time.
Just after noon I sallied out, having noticed my box of tissues was getting suspiciously low. I also wanted to look at a second hand bookshop I'd seen in Rother St, just off the market area. Alas, I couldn't summon interest in looking through the books when I got there, though it was both large and well organised.
I walked down the main street: Wood St then Bridge St (Stratford-upon-Avon streets tend to change names every block - it makes it easy to specify where a place is, and hard to find it). Lots of shops for both tourists and locals. A sample of my bus to Birmingham was waiting at the upper bus stop before starting its return run: a flash looking double-decker, in yellow and blue livery, with its route number painted large on front and sides: very different from the old wreck I came here in four or five years ago.
Aha! A tea shop. A real tea shop (naturally called The Real Tea café), selling not just black and green teas, but white and blue and "infusions" (never heard of blue tea before; somewhere between black and green, apparently). So I did what all old ladies with time on their hands do: I went in and ordered a coffee and a scone with jam and cream, then sat down, and took my time enjoying them (reading Vorkosiverse slash fanfic on my PDA the while, in case you were worried I was reverting too far to type). It was raining, after all (lightly, but visibly - no umbrellas in sight, though). Not by the time I left.
Then I went to Boots, and bought a bigger box of tissues. And checked through both Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencers, to find out where they keep the yoghurt, as I shall have to get some on my way to the bus on Saturday, and didn't want to be searching the shop with a heavy bag in tow.
That was quite enough of an excursion, so I went back to the hotel and got comfortable again, and tried to have a pre-theatre sleep (no luck there).
Not the fault of the production that I was miserable, though for quite some time I did wonder whether I shouldn't have stayed in bed for that, too. Probably not my worst ever night, but usually when I'm that sick I don't have to keep quiet about it. I wasn't the only person having difficulty not coughing (which was good, in a weird way, because it was quite embarrassing enough doing it, but doing it conspicuously alone? Eek). Worst, though, was not being able to blow my nose. I thought I was going to choke to death. At least continuous use of Strepsils suppressed most of the coughing impulse.
Moving right along from that glimpse of TMI to the production. This was The Tempest, the first of a set of three plays focussing on castaways, isolation, and consequent revelations, done with the same casts. (The others are Twelfth Night and what I persist in thinking of as Two Gentlemen of Ephesus, but which is really called The Comedy of Errors.)
In the advertising material they'd carefully refrained from saying these were modern dress productions (more or less modern dress; a lot of surrealist demi-Elizabethan dress for the non-human characters). Since the theatre was extensively remodelled over two summers, the interior is unmistakably a reflection of the London Globe Theatre, with a stage protruding well into the audience, and seats and galleries around ¾ of the round (octagonal) wall space. Which, as one audience member discontentedly observed, meant there wasn't room for scenery. They made do, believe me, with a stage floor canted fancifully in all directions, including up at the back, and incorporating the front part of a sometimes see-through glass/perspex/who knows cube which represented everything from the deck of the wrecking ship to Prospero's cell.
At first I wasn't very happy with all this (nor with the fact that Prospero, speaking to all parts of the house, and quietly, was sometimes very hard to follow). Miranda's part is a nithing's, but the actress did her best with girlish faith in daddy and astonished delight in other people finally appearing and instant love for Ferdinand. But things got under way at last, and both the evil intrigues and the low comedy (also evil intrigues) were well done.
I was confused at first by Ferdinand being played by a black man, wondering if this too were a message, but when his father the king came on, a middle aged white man, I decided they'd just picked a romantic lead for Miranda to react to. They also had the king's murderous brother played by a woman, with minimal amendments to the text; she did valiantly, and provided some entertainment with her sharp tongue. More acceptable, in a way, from a woman, reflecting less of Sebastian's sense of having been done out of something, since, as a woman, guess what, she is a second class citizen. A good deal of the time Ariel was a dead ringer for Prospero, which made sense in a weird way, showng the fluidity of the spirit's conception of self. So, you know, anything could have happened.
I didn't like Prospero, but if you read what everybody in the play says carefully, that's not surprising; he's a selfish pig with an anger management problem. Goodness knows how Ferdinand and Miranda are going to cope with being king and queen of Naples, since Ferdinand appears to be an ass as well as nearly as naïve as Miranda. Maybe the sister/brother Sebastian, having had a kick up the conscience, could be got on side to provide a leavening of practicality.
On the whole I enjoyed the production. I didn't enjoy the physical aspects of the night, but that discomfort will recede. Some time.
Forty years ago the programs were better. Just saying. Not buying another.
It was extremely cold walking back to the hotel (though it's only ten minutes), and I was wishing I'd remembered my pashmina to wrap around my throat - and possibly even a second sweat shirt to wear under my rain jacket. I warmed up smartly enough once in my room, though.
I finish with a close-up of another couple's guest room this morning - doors left open, no sign of them, goodness knows where they were! I thought this was confined to fiction.
High life - I can't get this to go into the post, but you can click on the link.