Four Gentlemen of Leisure

A quartet of Wednesday walkers started out from Leighterton this morning, and made for the Silkwood at Westonbirt, not a walk I knew. Though the sun didn't come out till later, it was very warm, and the scenery varied. Rather too many stiles for my liking.

I've come home this evening from an RSC live relay (to our Cineworld). Another first for me - Two Gentlemen of Verona. Though it's early Shakespeare, with a far from plausible plot, there are still plenty of good lines, and they came across well in Simon Godwin's production. Michael Bruce's music played a big part in creating a playful atmosphere, though no setting of the celebrated song is ever going to be a match for Schubert's An Sylvia.

The Windrush

Four of us, having parked under the vast Sycamore tree at Cold Aston this morning, walked to Aston Farm and then up the South bank of the Windrush, from where I photographed this peaceful scene. Another idyllic Spring day!

It follows two evenings out with Shakespeare. As You Like It performed by the Tobacco Factory at Cheltenham's Everyman Theatre last night, and Henry IV Part 1 relayed from Stratford to our Cineworld on Wednesday. In his magnum opus, Harold Bloom writes, "Shakespeare's invention of the human, already triumphant through his creation of Falstaff, acquired a new dimension with Rosalind... the most admirable personage in the whole of Shakespeare,... the most remarkable and persuasive representation of a woman in all of Western literature." What a privilege to see two excellent productions of these masterpieces on consecutive days!

"From Chaucer to Chesterton"

I have mentioned All Hallows before, in connection with Roger Bevan, who taught us music there. Whilst I was at Ampleforth earlier this week, I leafed through Fr. Edward Corbould's copy of Christopher Bird's excellent book, The Cherry Jumpers, which looks back over 75 years since All Hallows started. One of the book's highlights (for me) was a piece Fr. Edward himself wrote detailing the headmaster, Francis Dix's sadistic teaching methods. It brought back vividly being threatened with a beating if I couldn't remember my Catechism answers correctly.

Interestingly, Bird's book doesn't quote from Auberon Waugh's autobiography, Will this do?: that lists other All Hallows horrors, though I don't remember what they were exactly: it's a while since I read it.

This photograph portrays some of those in the All Hallows Christmas 1954 entertainment. So far as my memory serves, with the parts played, they were as follows. From the left, back row: M. Bartlett (Mrs. Squeers); me (Flute the bellows-mender, playing Thisbe); David Russell (Richard II); Lewin Bowring (Guiseppe), Terence Bantock (The Duke of Plaza Toro) and Nicholas Fitzgerald (The Duchess – all from The Gondoliers); Roger Duncan (Macbeth); Gavin Poyntz-Wright (Lady Macbeth); Erik Pearse (Casilda, from The Gondoliers); Kit Barrington (Sir Oliver Surface) and Finn Fetherstonhaugh (Careless – both from The School for Scandal); Peter Pearson [he died soon after leaving Ampleforth] (a gentleman, in Get up and bar the door). In the front row: Martin Finn (Bottom the Weaver); Charles Atthill [now living in the US] (a Pope poem); P. Downey (Moses, The School for Scandal); John McEwen [Art critic] (Koko, from The Mikado); Peter Young (a Pope poem); Anthony Gilroy (Charles Surface, The School for Scandal); ?; Christopher Fletcher (Marco, from The Gondoliers); Peter Prideaux-Brune (Noah, the Chester Miracle Play); ?; and Gerald Towell [Towell and Scott] (Nicholas Nickleby).

I am indebted to the All Hallows Chronicle, 1954-56 for the details of this weirdly eclectic show. The Chronicle records even the most mundane day-to-day events in the life of the school in loving detail, an amazing legacy - no doubt created by Dix himself or possibly his wife Evelyn.

I've now learnt that Fr Edward told the book's author - too late for the book - of when he was teaching briefly at All Hallows having just left Ampleforth (we played him up no end): he remembers posting his application to join the Ampleforth novitiate in the letter-box alongside the old chapel of St James on the back lane adjoining Scouts' Wood, and thinking, "Well, there's my future sorted out until I die."

Going back to that entertainment, it's strange how things from so long ago come sharply back to mind. David Russell's Richard II excerpt was all about "graves and worms and epitaphs." And it put me off Richard II for years. In fact, until last night, when we watched the RSC live relay at our Cineworld. Magnificent!

I note that the first time I saw the play right through was with David Warner as the king in 1964; then Ian McKellen (1969) and Ian Richardson (1973) - all at the RSC. In that last production, by John Barton, David Suchet played a messenger.

"Twelfth Night"

Happy 448th birthday, William Shakespeare! To celebrate it, there were madrigals - my photograph shows them being sung by Shakespeare's (decorated) bust at the foot of the RST main stairs, but elsewhere too.

Other Stratford merriment included sonnets on the chain ferry: we crossed over on it, having tickets for Twelfth Night in the main theatre this afternoon. As last week, with The Tempest, David Farr directed, and Jonathan Slinger, Emily Taaffe and Kirsty Bushell led a strong cast.

Row G in the Stalls suited me fine, with a gangway in front for me to stretch out my legs: it's worth the premium you pay to have this degree of comfort, the first time I've experienced it. At one point - from the plume of smoke Caroline pointed out to me, emerging from behind the stage - it looked as if the theatre was about to catch fire; so it's also handy being able to dash for the exit when necessary. (It wasn't.)

I enjoyed, but without going overboard, both performances and production. Just one belly laugh I counted, and the very act of keeping count is an indication of some reserve.

Could it be my favourite Shakespeare play? If so, it's because it was the very first I saw, when that I was and a little tiny boy. Well, an impressionable 12-year-old anyway, whose parents took him, in 1955, to Gielgud's production, also at Stratford: a lisping Olivier ("Thome are born great...") played Malvolio, and his then wife, Viola. In the interval, my mother and I walked to the East end of what was then the narrow riverside balcony, and watched Vivien Leigh standing at her dressing-room French window.

Fast forward nine years, and I saw the play again, this time at the Oxford Playhouse - in Michael Rudman's OUDS production, with Michael York as Orsino: the cast included Oliver Ford Davies, David Aukin (Malvolio) and Annabel Leventon (a well-upholstered Viola). Other memorable Malvolio/Viola couplings were Donald Sinden/Judi Dench (1969) and Nicol Williamson/Jane Lapotaire (1974). The list is incomplete, as are my records, alas.

But no previous Aguecheek, not Michael Denison, nor Michael Elwyn, nor David Warner, nor even my hero Ian Richardson, matches - to my mind - the splendid Bruce MacKinnon in the present production.

"The Tempest"

"I have bedimm'd the noontide sun..." says Jonathan Slinger's Prospero, as we sit ensconced inside the Royal Shakespeare Theatre through a fine, bright Saturday afternoon watching The Tempest.

As we've found before in Stratford's revamped main house, some of those magic words were lost to us this time also: we were in the extreme left corner of the Circle (as you look at the stage) - this may have had something to do with it, or are we just getting older and deafer? Slinger's admirably wide-ranging voice seemed to drop almost to a whisper at times. He has little of John Wood's presence, but the virtual twinning of Prospero and Ariel - Father and Holy Spirit - was inspired.

The Dramatis Personae listing Sebastian as King Alonso's brother makes it feel wilful at first to cast a high-heeled, curvaceous Kirsty Bushell in the part. But this is all part and parcel of a brilliant production by David Farr: a highly poetic and mysterious play is given to us full of real theatre - indeed, this Tempest is one of the best RSC renderings we have caught in recent years.

The Meckler "Dream"

My first "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was the then 28-year-old Peter Hall's 1959 production at Stratford-upon-Avon - in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. It was a pastoral "Dream", as I recall. On the evidence of the matinée yesterday on the same site (but in a rebuilt as well as renamed theatre), I doubt many of the cast of the production by Nancy Meckler will be as well-known to theatre-goers 50 years hence as Charles Laughton (Peter Hall's Bottom), Ian Holm (Puck), Albert Finney (Lysander) or Vanessa Redgrave (Helena) are today.

Yes, there were a couple of understudies yesterday, but this does not account for the loss of so much poetry. I exonerate the stand-in Bottom, Felix Hayes, and Alex Hassell, an excellent Demetrius; but few of the others, bent as they were on displaying more larynx than lyricism, gabbled lines often jarringly shouted.

Meckler has some fine credits to her name, but her Gothic production (designed by Katrina Lindsay to place the emphasis on "night") smacked less of 24th June than Walpurgisnacht: the dismal Puck even carried a broomstick. It was amusing to have alternate readings from Folio and Quarto spelled out at one point, but what was the dramatic value of Bottom and Flute revelling so explicitly in each other's erotic capital? This was a production of effects, but little magic. There were moments when it took off ("Tie up my love's tongue, bring him silently"), but precious few.

I expect all this carping comes from age and from having a slight ear infection. After all, most of the others in the audience seemed to enjoy themselves hugely. (As of course I did, really.)

Henry IV Part II

The 2010 Globe Theatre production of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays came to our local Cineworld last night. It was a long evening, as we had a false start - they put the wrong tape in, so we began with the first scene of Henry IV Part I ("So shaken as we are, so wan with care..." - rather a bonus). The production by Dominic Dromgoole was noisy, vivacious and only momentarily moving ("If I had a thousand sons..."): there was no foretaste of Chekhov as in Peter Hall's so-memorable RSC version in the early '60s, with Hugh Griffith and Roy Dotrice as Falstaff and Shallow. But the Globe gave us the marvellous, rumbustuous Roger Allam as the not-too-fat knight and a totally brilliant William Gaunt as Shallow. These apart, though, and save when it went down Gloucestershire way, the acting was one-dimmensional.

Everyman Shakespeare

Our literary festival has forged good links with the Royal Shakespeare Company over the years, though there have inevitably been last-minute cancellations. Yesterday, however, three Cleopatras lined up according to schedule on the stage of Cheltenham's Everyman Theatre, for a discussion that never quite took flight. Mainly, Janet Suzman, Harriet Walter and (pictured here) Noma Dumezweni were too polite to each other. You longed for a touch of the asp to enter their conversation. And above all you ached to hear one of them launch into "His legs bestrid the ocean". They lacked a prompter.

Later in the day, Michael Pennington made an altogether more memorable appearance on the same stage. Pennington described catching the Shakespeare bug at the age of 11, and never having shaken it off: his resulting one-man Shakespeare show "Sweet William" is a tour de force.

"Sweet William" runs through what we know of Shakespeare's life in chronological sequence, with the actor morphing into both major and minor characters to illustrate the developing achievement of the playwright and in particular its historical and political context. Apart from audience coughing all round me, which would never have been tolerated during the performance of a play, I have seldom enjoyed a LitFest evening more.