The Winter's Tale, Mr Huhn, Lies, Freedom, good and bad food and drink

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s headquarters and the cultural capital of England is in Stratford upon Avon, housed in what is surely one of the ugliest and badly designed buildings in the world.
The stage and seating are superb, but very little else is either aesthetically pleasing or easy to navigate and use.

 It looks like a power station....

 .....it feels like a prison

These pictures show how impractical and prison - like the interior of the theatre is; the gloomy rooftop restaurant, most of which is shut off from the view and any light; the narrow corridors ; the stairwell with its tiny windows.
Surely the architect should be forbidden from practising again and sent to Siberia?
 To add to the desecration created by this white collar vandal, a fine copse of ancient oaks which once proudly stood in front of the theatre was cut down to be replaced by a bland lawn and rectangular path pattern.

‘Man was born for happiness as a bird for flight’ - wrote the Russian writer V.G Korelenko, and in Revelations in The Bible it says that ‘there shall be no more pain and there shall be no more tears'.

Perhaps W. Shakespeare had both of these thoughts in mind when he wrote ‘The Winter’s Tale’ around 1610, with the proviso that we can’t just inherit a happy and pain free life - we have to earn one and deserve it, and if we take it away from others, we have to earn it back again.

The plot of the play is absurd, but life itself is absurd so that the drama provides a perfect medium through which resonates the cruelty and tyranny of our own little lives which we find mirrored in the disjointed and extravagant adventures of these characters on stage, who seem to live in a bizarre confabulation of classical Greece and Christian saturated Sicily and Bohemia, defying logic except the meandering logic of the heart.

Elena and I were in Stratford again to see the play and renew our search for the lost spirit of Merrie England, Shakespeare’s England, the period when complete bastards like Francis Drake murdered and plundered on the high seas to impress Queen Elizabeth in the hope of a monopoly or two. 
This spirit has been lost somewhere in a shopping mall and the global banking cartel, the former by the common consumerate and the latter by the self deluded ‘ masters of the universe’ who seem to think that shuffling money around the world is tough guys work and justifies danger money in return.
In Shakespeare’s day you had to risk your life to make a fortune and since lives and livelihoods were often on the line the language was straight and sharp :

‘ We are but plain fellows sir’
‘ A lie, you are rough and hairy’

This is sterner stuff than the former Energy Minister Mr Huhn is capable of, who was only able to confess his lies to the police and his forcing his wife to lie on his behalf with the evasive sentence ‘ I am deeply sorry for something that happened a long time ago’

Something that happened?

A lie, thou smooth skinned sop, something you did deliberately and would do again given half a chance!

We will probably be sued by Mr Huhn for this accurate amendment with addition.

A mental patient rang the social services, care workers and mental health workers to tell them that she was dangerous, had killed before and would kill again. All these ignored her and she went on to behead and kill an elderly woman.

The social services stated that the calls she made were a ‘ missed opportunity’

You’re not kidding.

Ah well, from the play we made our way again to The Thatched Tavern, the best pub in Stratford, which on our last visit had run out of beer.

This time, all barrels were in place and fine foaming ale was flowing.

Gini was friendly unaffected and helpful

We settled down to good solid simple fare - Falstaff would have appreciated it, but the cleanliness of the toilets would have astounded him.
Look at these - Elena was nearly arrested for loitering with indecent attempt in the ladies, as was I in the gents, as we were so determined to capture these gleaming and hygienic examples of a facility that, in a British pub, is usually a stinking and dangerous affront to the senses.

The Gents! (photo by Mark Rapley)

.......and The Ladies!

How much better was the food and service here, at a fraction of the price, than we were fleeced for at a recent visit to the posh St John in Farringdon in London - actually, the service was good, but misleading insofar as we were sold a dish on the grounds that there was only one left which turned out to be awful.
Restaurants in London get away with murder for the same reason that people do - nobody has the courage, or the energy, as they once did, to protest or complain or intervene.

We are all too timid, listless and lifeless, our ennui is endless, we regurgitate opinion pumped out ready made for us like the ready made plastic meals we eat from our supermarkets that are slowly strangling and wringing any pungency and taste from British life.

Stop though.....

........It’s not all bad, at least we are free, free to set up in business, drink and eat where we want, listen to what we want, free to abuse these freedoms or ignore them as we wish.

We decided to drink too much and abuse the freedom to drink and abuse our bodies at The Riding House Cafe on Great Titchfied Street, London W1.

This place is a hang for well heeled media and rag trade types, the beautiful people - how did I get in?
They were free to turn me away, for being too old and not wearing Converse plimsolls, but maybe they could smell my debit card burning a hole in my pocket.

The crowd of free dancing young made us feel young and free too - enough said, you know the rest, and thank God for the modern world and paracetamol.

We were made for happiness, but there will always be pain.


Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce

Shakespeare's spirit banished from Stratford - upon-Avon

‘A thousand townsmen, gentlemen and whores, porters and servingmen’, would ‘together throng’ in Shakespeares day, to watch his plays, according to a poet who was there.

Other sources have the audience including the 'Groupies' of that time, keen to share their favours with the stars, including Shakespeare himself, who began his theatrical career as an actor before graduating to become the world’s greatest playwriter. (There is no evidence of plaster casts being taken, but lack of evidence doesn’t mean lack of the action - like the elusive Higgs-Boson particle being searched for at vast expense at CERN, near Geneva.)

The rumbustious and turbulent spirit suggested by these observations cannot be felt in the birthplace of Shakespeare: Stratford - upon-Avon has been stripped of any character and authenticity it might have once carried, any remaining socially seditious sentiments have been air blasted out like the last few feathers of a Bernard Matthews mass market turkey, leaving it a tasteless lump of a town - with one exception: the rejuvenated Royal Shakespeare Society’s Swan Theatre, or at least the recently revamped interior, since the exterior still looks like an early multi-story car park.

The stage and auditorium, whilst being completely covered and protected from the elements,unlike the theatres of Shakespeare’s day, still manage to convey to the audience a sense of being almost in the action,on show to the other members of the audience in the way that the gallants of his day were as they sat on stools at the edge of the stage, commenting on the action and the poetry.

Elena and I had booked a bargain break in Stratford to catch The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s feminist comedy, in which the women come out on top and the men are mostly fops, or seedy sots, debauched or dolts, deluded or deranged.

There is only one real man among this lot, the young Fenton ( his name immortalised by the eponymous dog of YouTube fame who chases the deer on Richmond Park, chased in turn by his irate owner who succeeds only in compounding the problem ) who gets the girl that all his rivals want to marry only for her money, although he is strikingly frank in admitting that he too had this for his first motive, until love eventually blinded him to the pecuniary component of her attractions.

The production was hilarious, chaotic, tears and laughter nearly had me tumbling from my steep and precarious cheap seat onto the stage below. We had the feeling that had this happened, the actors and audience would have merely guffawed and dragged me off the stage, but only if I obscured their view or their movements, otherwise I’d have been left to enjoy the performance from there.

After the show, emotionally and physically satisfied in a way that one rarely is by the cinema, we went off in search of a good traditional pub and some good pub food. But Stratford has succumbed to the temptation to appeal to the lowest common denominator rather than do a bit more work in search of the highest common factor of the tourist market. Tat and trivia everywhere, the pubs more like big TV viewing rooms than restful drinking dens, which is what they should be, surely?

In these sad surroundings, from the verbal gymnastics of William Shakespeare we were now confronted and assaulted by the inane and moronic bleeps and blasts of the world of screen entertainment, to which were glued the dull and glassy eyes of the screen based generation.

We fled from these hollow shams and eventually found the oldest pub in England, built in 1470- The Old Thatched Tavern, which had resisted the temptation to modernise itself with plastic and interactive entertainment. 

We had found an oasis of authentic fifteenth century England, and all we needed was a decent genuine ale and some traditional food. But they had run out of beer, and we couldn’t get a table.

‘Oh there’s nothing so dreadful, morbid or drear,

as to stand at the bar of a pub with no beer’

 So goes the traditional Australian refrain, which sprang into my mind, and which we sang to the astonished barmaid, because back in WS’s day, folk lived, we believe, more intensely, always closer to the edge and end of life, they were hence more alive, they shouted, and sang and swore, fought and fucked, laughed and loved.

Inspired by The Merry Wives of Windsor, we were in the mood.

Unless otherwise stated all photographs by Elena Bruce