A Shakespearean Jaunt Part 1 – 15/07/23

A few years ago I was reading “The Swish of the Curtain” to Eva and we both enjoyed the chapter where the Bishop takes the Blue Doors to Stratford Upon Avon and Maddie scandalises the dining room by telling everyone that the Bishop was her father and Sandra was her mother. Randomly, I had a photo of that very chapter in my Google Photos. Don’t ask why:

Although I don’t know many kindly Bishops, it did plant the idea in my head that a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon is something that every budding Shakespeare fan should experience at some point. I think my sister took me there when I was 13, probably to see Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I very much fancied taking Eva there too. I didn’t think we’d ever get round to it but the weekend where Reuben was away and I had no choir gig seemed the perfect time to have a girls’ weekend away and grant Nathan some well-deserved peace and quiet.

I planned to travel light but I never quite pull that off so we had a suitcase each, as well as a bag containing picnic blankets, snacks and a giant umbrella. This would be unwieldy at the best of times  but when there are no trains and we had to cram onto the bus to get to Walthamstow….well, it was lucky that no one lost an eye.

Two tubes later, we were at Marylebone which is a very neat little station and I’m not sure I’ve ever caught a train from there before. They had a Pret, which meant I could get my free coffee, but I didn’t exactly think through how to balance my coffee and Eva’s hot chocolate as well as all the suitcases. Again, we were lucky to escape disaster-free.

Also, this station needs more than 12 cubicles in the Ladies’. Just saying.

We were early enough that we could get a seat on the train without much trouble. I piled the suitcases around my knees so that Eva could have space to drink her hot chocolate. Standard stuff.

In “Swish of the Curtain” they have to take three trains to get from Fenchester to Stratford-Upon-Avon and it takes most of the day. I don’t know where Fenchester is – possibly somewhere near Colchester – but we only needed two. We changed at Leamington Spa onto a line that seemed to be called “The Shakespeare Line”. This was a good sign.

The train stopped at every tiny station along the way, including some that were so small they only had one platform. The weather had been variable during the journey and often seemed to be raining on just one side of the train but it was still looking dry outside when we finally got to Stratford-Upon-Avon.

That did not last. It tipped it down as we started walking and I only had the roughest idea of where we were going because my phone doesn’t do well in torrential rain. So we headed towards the town centre and quickly spotted Shakespeare’s birthplace. I knew our Premier Inn was a few minutes away from that so when I saw the familiar purple sign up the road, I walked towards it.

Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

It was only after we’d left our suitcases there, used the loos and set off again that the nagging doubts set in. Sure enough, I checked my phone – the rain had stopped by now – and it transpired that there was indeed another Premier Inn in the centre of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

It also transpired that I didn’t care that much. We’d sort it out later once we got some food. It would all be fine.

We lunched at Ye Olde Subway because Eva does like a bit of familiarity in new places and I believe it was where Shakespeare first ordered a footlong Chicken Teriyaki and a rainbow cookie. In fact, the Hearty Italian is thought to have been the reason he set so many of his plays in Italy – looking out, as we did, on a rain-soaked Henley Street, that bread transported him to the sunnier climes of Verona and Venice.

We were having similar thoughts but Verona would have to wait for the next day because Ephesus was first on the itinerary. And that’s Ephesus via the Dell Outdoor Theatre, which is just down the river from the town centre, in a windswept Avonbank Gardens. It wasn’t ideal weather for outdoor Shakespeare, as it was fluctuating between blazing sun and the aforementioned torrential rain, but the Sweet Sorrow Theatre Company was persevering with “The Comedy of Errors” against the odds. There was a line about “they cannot hear us above the wind”, which caused great hilarity given the weather conditions but we could hear…just about. The umbrella I’d been carting about certainly came in handy but it turns out we needn’t have bothered with the picnic blankets as there are lovely RSC people on hand to lend you one of theirs.

Eva very much enjoyed the show and knew the story so it didn’t matter that we were a few minutes late. A friend of mine told me that Shakespeare actually wrote his opening scenes to be slightly throwaway so that latecomers didn’t miss vital plot points and that really worked in our favour. Of course, with “Comedy of Errors”, the only real plot point you need to know is that there are two sets of twins and mass confusion ensues. Then you can just sit back and enjoy the slapstick comedy and the goldsmith’s ever-changing accent.

I particularly liked Adriana, who was suitably overbearing and confused and the door prop for the scene at her house was very clever. I couldn’t always remember which Antipholus was which but a detail on their matching pink jackets gave it away – one had it on the right lapel and the other on the right.

Eva had chosen her spring beret to take on the trip with us instead of the usual summer trilby, on the basis that it looked more Shakespearean…and she wasn’t wrong, given that one of the Dromios was sporting one that was near-identical:

After the play, we were meeting my brother and his family for dinner but there was just one problem – my phone was almost out of battery and my charger was in my suitcase in the wrong hotel, which was quite some way away. So I went with the 90s solutions (1590s?) and used the last of my battery to tell him a place and time to meet. We’d already located the Shakespeare statue earlier in the day so that seemed like an obvious landmark, even if none of us quite knew our way around the town.

And, of course, meeting him there but with no way of contacting him if either of us were running late opened up the possibility of hilarious hijinks involving a gold chain. My brother and I do look quite similar and it’s almost certain that someone would fall in love with one of us, believing us to be the other one. I’m led to believe that kind of thing happens all the time in these kind of places.

One thing that did happen was that I got weirdly disorientated and kept finding myself places I didn’t expect to be. It’s probably just an unfamiliar town and bendy ancient streets but I got lost more than I usually do in new places. I’m gonna blame Puck because someone kept pointing those streets in different directions and he’s got form.

Happily though, we did find the family and set off looking for a wheelchair accessible restaurant, which is not easy in a town full of historic buildings. In our crazed wanderings earlier, I has spotted a newer development with a Nandos and some other places. The newness of it suggested DDA compliance to meet and, sure enough, an ASK fit the bill and fit us in. We had a lovely dinner and then a post-dinner walk down to Shakespeare’s grave to let the food go down. We didn’t see the grave itself because it’s inside a church and chargeable btu we did spot the memorial trees for Judith and Hamnet.

In case you’re wondering, we did manage to check into the correct hotel earlier on and even transport our suitcases from one to the other. But you don’t need the dull details of all that. You can just assured that Eva and I did find ourselves a bed for the night. And even bumped into a Highams Parker along the way.

It might sound like we packed a lot in already but there’s more to come….so I might just split this blog post in two. Try not to go too mad with impatience for the second part…For to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?