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I am not only doing my podcasts during the daylight hours, but trying to do my socialising and dating then too. Just don't tell the wife.
I don't want to spoil the surprise.
Catie and me went to London as soon as I'd dropped the kids off at school (blimey the trains charge you commuters way more than the daytime travellers - the cunts). We went for another fab breakfast at Dishoom in Kings Cross (I think I'd happily eat here or at Sticks n Sushi for every meal) and then went to the Barbican to see the matinee of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It started at 1.30pm so I thought we'd be back to take over from a babysitter who had the kids til 6pm, but then found out the show was two and a half hours long (including interval) which added a bit of jeopardy. It was only when we got to the theatre that we found out the show was in fact now two hours fifty (mainly due to Mat Baynton's mugging, I assume) which added more jeopardy. Luckily the theatre sent us an urgent text and email about this time change. Unluckily it arrived fifteen minutes after the performance was over and we were at the tube station. But still.
We made it home with half an hour to spare.
It's fucking great living five minutes walk from the station.
We mooched round the Barbican shop before the show (and weren't criticised for mooching, though Catie did buy a book) and sat and looked at our phones by a stand selling drinks and sweets. The very patient young woman serving there had to deal with a lot of patrons asking very basic questions about where they had to go, even though things were quite well sign posted. The audience that go to see Shakespeare at the Barbican definitely give off the air that they consider themselves to be clever, yet hearing them fail to understand how a theatre works over and over again made me suspect they aren't clever at all.
It's one thing to laugh loudly at a Shakesperian joke that you've previously looked up in a book, but quite another to just navigate your way through life.
Luckily though this wasn't a clever/clever version of Shakespeare. I was reminded of school trips to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch impenetrable plays that I barely remember now apart from one of the cast of Blake's Seven played a witch in Macbeth and you could get the opera glasses for free, despite their maybe 50p fee (possibly 10p), by putting your watch strap into the coin slot.
I was reminded of this stuff partly because there were a few school kids in the audience and it was reassuring that even though the world has changed in the last forty or so years, their reaction to Shakespeare is the same today as back then. There were nervous laughs and a noticeable thrill coming from those areas of the audience when there was a rude bit of business and at once point when the audience applauded, a game of "Who can applaud last" broke out with some brave children doing a single clap maybe a minute or so after the applause had died down.
But the point I am making is that I had sometimes struggled to follow Shakespeare plays, even when I was studying the text, but this very impressive cast and backstage team really made this play make perfect sense. Which is even more admirable because MSND as the cool kids call it, is a load of fucking nonsense.
The Mechanicals were excellent, and Baynton was a star whilst still being a team player and the comedy (often additional to the text, but not entirely) was properly funny. Everything looked like it was pretty much wrapped up 30 minutes before the supposed end time, but Shakespeare, like a total fucking idiot, added a massive and unnecessary scene on at the end, which did indeed take half an hour. It's entirely superfluous and quite self-indulgent, but also the best thing in it (especially in this production) and I like the fact that it seems to be a pretty sharp parody of Romeo and Juliet. That the same playwright (allegedly) can in quite quick order play the same story for tragedy and laughs is pretty cool. That the whole thing is just tacked on once the proper (fairly flimsy, but still fun) story is done and feels a bit like something your teachers might do at an end of term concern makes it even better.
It's really fabulous - and the staging and direction is beautiful and actually genuinely magical. It's the best Shakespeare production I've seen (including the Kings of Wessex production of the Tempest from about 1983 in which I played what has been called the best Trinculo ever, by my mum) and even the kinds of idiots who don't know how to find a toilet or the stalls of the theatre liked it. And I fancy that even the school kids had a fun experience and didn't need to temporarily steal binoculars to make it enjoyable (why didn't we keep the binoculars, I wonder? We just took them illegally and then meekly put them back in the holders. We could have had free red binoculars. Did we really think the theatre would track down who had been in those seats and travel to Cheddar to recover them? Even if they did work out who'd been sitting there that didn't prove we'd taken them. What kind of idiot am I? I could be looking through those binoculars right now.
I'd never have dreamed back then that I'd one day go and see some Shakespeare, understand it all, pay £65 for a ticket (half price by the way) and still have a good time. But fuck you 16 year old Richard Herring. You were an idiot and you couldn't even win the clapping game.
You'd also have liked this one too.
As an additional bit I'd just like to say that in spite of having a job where I am my own boss I have pretty consistently failed to take advantage of that fact in my life, the work ethic that I guess I got from my parents making me feel bad if I don't at least try to work in the daytime. It's good that I now (occasionally) take advantage of my freedom to do stuff like this, but fuck me I should have done it when I was younger. I am glad I am doing it now though.
