17 July...on the train

Phew. I’ve spent the last five days in Stratford, which would have been a bittersweetly nostalgic visit to my old stomping grounds if it hadn’t been almost entirely spent in archives and libraries. Still, it was a good time, and it was lovely to catch up with my friend S, in whose sixteenth-century guest room I’ve been crashing on a futon. I’ve been collating theater reviews of the past half century of Henry V productions, and watching the RSC’s video archives of Henrys: Kenneth Branagh’s post-Falklands tortured anti-hero, Iain Glen’s tight-jawed and squeaky warrior monk, Michael Sheen’s uni-student-turned-GI, and Will Houston’s terrifying, grinning bureaucrat of death. Also a bizarre Italian interpretation from the Complete Works Festival last year, starring three speaking characters – which I named Fatty, Baldy, and Frenchy -- screeching speeches in Italian into a microphone (with the supertitles unreadable on the video, of course) while doing the dance of an autistic clown among rows of recumbent white-faced corpses.

I also managed to see two current shows at the Courtyard Theatre, the temporary home of the RSC while they build the main house into an actually usable theater space cum Shakespearean mall complex. The revival of Greg Doran’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its puppetry and a Bottom that reminds me of nothing so much as Lister from Red Dwarf, was as delightful as the Taming of the Shrew is thoroughly, unrelentingly repugnant. Somehow the director, whose name I forget – someone whose teeth should be slowly removed with a ball-peen hammer – made a production that’s even more offensive than the play Shakespeare wrote. Not easy to do, really, but in trying to be “brave” and “edgy” it never managed to be brave or edgy. Even my favorite English actor, Stephen Boxer, was atrocious in this, though to be fair he seemed to be doing the best he could against some abysmal direction. And Michelle Gomez, apparently a well-known sitcom actress, was floundering about unpleasantly at every turn. The low point would be when she offers to whore her bottom to a repulsive and sadistic Tranio for a bit of food. We get it. Misogyny is bad. Sheesh. Mind you, the crowd seemed to be dutifully liking it, particularly the hilarious Jamaican racist caricatures. I hate people sometimes.

Also, Alexander Hleb left Arsenal for Barcelona yesterday. Bastard.

But the train ride back to London is beautiful and green, and for all that everyone hates English weather, I’m liking it as a nice change from desert heat and wildfires. Today I’m taking off from research to see King Lear at the Globe, probably in the rain, and get a bankside pint with another friend-I-haven’t-seen-in-years, with whom I’m staying for the next week in the Big Smoke.

M takes the bar in a week and a half, and so presumably the pressure is mounting. I’ll get home just in time to offer what emotional support I can. I think she’s riding a bit higher, having gotten her class rankings and found out that she got her JD cum laude. I’m extraordinarily pleased for her.

I’m going to try to get some sleep now, between Warwick (home of the castle) and Banbury (home of the cake).