Yesterday, continued
So the first thing that went wrong is that I got to the train station and it was no longer a train station but a Labyrinth of Fell Intent. Didn’t I just say a few days ago, Never feel smug, it’ll nail you every time? Yes. I’d got to the station in vast quantities of extra time and positively strolled in from the car park, not quite humming a carefree tune, but nearly.* And arrived, and couldn’t get in. There were arrows describing ideal delights such as ticket purchase and departure platforms, pointing in obscure directions not included in the standard three dimensions. There were too many arrows, and the ones you needed, the ones that address this reality, were small and faded** and mostly behind you. And actually getting onto the correct platform . . . first you had to leave the station entirely, and then you had to curl back round and go under it after all through the standard pedestrian tunnel to get to the far side, and then you went up into the station again and were sent back out of the station again and up a ladder and through a hatch door where a sharpened pendulum whizzed by every x seconds and you had to figure out how long you had between whizzes to make a bolt for . . . okay, I made that last part up.
By the time I arrived on the platform I no longer had vast quantities of extra time, but as I settled down with THE REST IS NOISE I comforted myself with the thought that the platform was nearly empty and late afternoon on a bank holiday the train would be nearly empty too. This was the cue for the tannoy to crackle into life and splutter: the train to London now approaching the station is full and there is standing room only. We are sorry for any inconvenience. –Have I mentioned that NOISE is a big heavy hardback? That ebook-reader purchase may be nearer than I thought.
However I had still managed to catch the earlier train*** so I got to Waterloo with enough time that I decided to walk. I had my trusty A-Z and Radio Three’s assurance that Middle Temple Hall was really easy to find. You can saunter along Embankment and turn left up Middle Temple Lane and it’s right there.
No it isn’t.
I walked past Temple Place and then . . . a long stretch of gardens, a much too long stretch of gardens, including a tall closed barred black iron gate . . . and nothing else till Temple Avenue. Which is too far. So I turned around, a small coil of dread beginning to heat up in my stomach, and walked all the way back to Temple Place, seeing nothing on the way but the tall closed barred black iron gate. At this point I’m becoming seriously unhappy: you’re in the City of London there, which is entirely a Labyrinth of Fell Intent, and an ancient labyrinth, so its fell intent has had centuries to accumulate. I made it up to Fleet Street† and turned right again, to go past Middle Temple Lane from the north instead of the south.
At least this time there was a sign. It was right where it ought to be too, opposite Bell Yard. The sign said ‘Middle Temple Lane’ and it was hanging on the tall closed and locked solid black painted wooden doors. Possibly not only in the City of London do you get public thoroughfares closed by barn doors, but I don’t believe it’s a common situation. It was also starting to rain.
This time, however, perhaps because there was an actual sign declaring that we had arrived where we thought we wanted to arrive, there began to collect quite a little crowd of frustrated Midsummer goers, looking cross or anxious according to their personalities.†† One woman said disgustedly, oh, it’s bank holiday, of course it’s closed, and fished in her bag for her mobile phone: I know someone who’ll let us in, she said.
And so it proved. I even found the Nice Young Man from Radio Three before he’d put another black line through my name.††† He didn’t know anything about closed gates, apparently having been vouchsafed better directions. The pity of it to my mind however is that possibly as a result of needing to know that you have to come in from the east through a, ahem, labyrinth so complex it just shows as white space in my A-Z, there were fifteen or so empty seats for the rehearsal and that’s not because there weren’t fifteen people out there who would have loved to see it they’d known about it . . . or could find it.
It’s a tiny, very beautiful, very old hall, http://www.gardenvisit.com/book/london_and_its_environs_1927/21_the_inns_of_court_and_legal_london/middle_temple_hall
http://www.britannia.com/hiddenlondon/midtemphall.html
where Shakespeare may himself have played in a production of Twelfth Night. Audiences were smaller in those days. I’d say it seats around two hundred, although my eye for these things is fairly dire, but it’s a long thin space, and last night there was a long thin stage on the inner long wall, where the orchestra sat: the eight actors pingponged all over the hall, and the choir was in the minstrels’ gallery, although the soloists emerged (smiling) to stand on shilling-sized bits of empty stage long enough to sing.
The one fairly important complaint‡ I had was that the logistics of it were that there was probably no seat in the house that could see everything: certainly I missed enough to fret over: you’ll be better off watching it on TV/computer screen.‡‡ On the other hand the space is so small that you could hear all of it easily, and the cast galloped around so much that if you weren’t seeing anything this moment, you will in a tick, and in fact the breeze of their going will probably blow your hair back. I was, as I said last night, sitting in the front row‡‡‡, so for certain stretches I very nearly had players in the lap, very much like hellhounds: long-limbed and twitchy. Demetrius managed to trip rather hard over my foot at one point§ without ever breaking stride.§§ And while I’ve been to breaking-the-fourth-wall productions before, I’ve rarely been three feet away from the orchestra, and I swear I could hear every individual string of the violins in the humming-strings bars of Mendelssohn’s music, and that was thrilling too. The acoustics in that small 16th-century hall are also very different from what a modern concert goer is used to: the first minute or so I was thinking ‘wooa, what is this?’, but that subsides almost at once, and then you’re listening closely to this sparkly new piece that sounds a lot like that old concert chestnut, Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. . . .
I find that I don’t want to tell you the best parts because I’d rather you saw it/them for yourselves. I’ll probably watch it again in broadcast, for the things I missed because they were on the wrong side of the hall. Perhaps what impressed me the most forcibly, I who don’t like Shakespeare, is how absolutely riveting this play can be when performed well. The cast was obviously enjoying themselves immensely, and you could sharpen knives off their delivery. §§§ And this production, with the orchestra–and the music–and the actors and the audience all mixed up together, works a treat. There is no overt staging per se–just the actors popping up and down and on and off with some changes of costume so you know when Helena is Helena and when she is Snug¤–and there are some deliciously funny bits of business with musical instruments: I especially liked the creative use of the saxophone. And when Pyramus charges on stage carrying a sword and shield ( . . . I’ll give you this one), they’re a bow and a cymbal.
The sad end to all this however is that I’m not going to become one of Radio Three’s army of itinerant aesthetes: I had assumed from the phrasing of the original contact that they were going to pay my expenses. They aren’t. And a return ticket to Waterloo now costs £30. And I’d've needed a taxi to get me to the train station after Words and Music on Sunday, which I’m now not going to. I can get into enough trouble without help if I’m paying for it. However this Midsummer Night’s Dream was a really terrific one-off.
* * *
* This is always stupid on a weekend. The entire public transport system is possessed by demons on weekends.
** Apparently they’ve been there a while. Uh oh.
*** If I’d waited for the second one it would probably have been empty. No, because I didn’t wait for it, it was empty. If I had waited for it . . . it would have been cancelled.
† Sic, Fleet Street being one of the areas of London where I get an automatic thrill of history and, uh, Stephen Sondheim. Although most of it is just a dirty boring modern business district, things like the Royal Courts of Justice loom out of the ugly present at you and go ‘boo’. http://photoguide.to/london/royalcourtsofjustice.html
†† I was both, of course. And I saw one twelve-year-old looking positively relieved. Not for long however.
††† To go with the ‘I’m in Australia’ line. See yesterday’s entry.
‡ My most important minor complaint is why did poor Helena’s dress fit so badly? Was she a last-minute stand-in? Surely someone in the stage crew had a needle and some thread?
‡‡ Which you are going to do, aren’t you?
‡‡‡ They were filming last night too, although the official performance is tonight, for ‘fill in’ shots. They won’t be able to use any from my end of the hall, however, which is where the fifteen empty seats were.
§ . . . despite it being tucked under my chair at the time: I’m not sure how he managed this. He’s also the one who told me to rive and dissever the plastic wand at the end, so on reflection I’ve decided that he mistook me for someone he’s had a running feud with for some years and was scoring a few points. He’d been tipped off that his adversary masquerading as a sensible middle-aged woman was coming last night, but that he’d know her for an imposter by the All Stars. –I had lady shoes with me! I just never quite put them on! And if members of the cast are going to trip over them I’m glad I didn’t!
§§ One of the more useful things they teach you in Actor School.
§§§ Peter says I might like to put in somewhere that he is in the unusual position of having played all four of the young Midsummer lovers. He got pressed into playing girls, including Hermia and Helena, when he was in prep school; and the Gloucestershire branch of his family were into amateur theatricals fairly heavily, and one year when Demetrius couldn’t remember his lines he was swapped with Lysander, who has less to say. But he couldn’t remember them either, so Peter, who was now playing Demetrius but already knew Lysander, ended up being responsible for most of the dialogue on stage. I neglected to ask if he thought to do them in different voices.
¤ The lion is one of the best bits
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