Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be

Here we have John Cleese representing Britain doing a Silly Walk over the edge of a cliff. It is a fitting image for the increasingly farcical - not to say threatening - situation here.  In fact, yesterday morning, I burst into laughter reading the latest news headlines on my phone.  "Someone," I said, "should write a play about this."

For those of you overseas, I'd say that here in Britain there has just been a national referendum vote to leave the European Union, a decision which will smash up much of our industry, devalue our currency, change our laws and, indeed, totally change all our lives.  All of us, no matter what we voted, are now reeling from the barrage of disturbing and unprecedented events in reaction to this.    It really seems as if the imps are in charge here, or perhaps those amoral and mischievous fairy free spirits of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. 

So, it is appropriate if I now tell you about the amazing performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which T and I went to see on Sunday at the Globe Theatre, on the South Bank of the Thames. That's it in the picture below. As you probably know, it's a thatched and half-timbered reconstruction of the theatre that stood a few metres away in which William Shakespeare and his company performed his own plays.

The theatre is circular, with the centre open to the skies.  Pay £5 and you can stand in this pit for three hours and watch the play from very close.  In Shakespeare's day the lowly people who could only afford a cheap price were called "groundlings" - the richer folk sat in wooden galleries all around.   

It rained, (it has been raining almost non stop this month) and we draped ourselves in waterproofs, but believe me, it was worth it.   What an amazing production it was, a bit like a panto, a bit like a musical, with every single member of the cast most astonishingly talented at singing, dancing, comedy and, of course, declaiming Shakespeare. 

The stage is very splendid, the set and costumes a mixture of Bollywood (see the lady with the sitar at the top), rock festival and B movie. 

Beautifully performed though the play was, the production was not one for the purists. (in fact, I even noticed some lines from John Donne's "To His Mistress Going To Bed" slipped in towards the end, which certainly isn't in the play I thought I knew).   Yet, it surely must have felt like this in Shakespeare's day, I thought, as the audience rocked with laughter, shouted at the actors and clapped to the music - and once again I realised what a great playwright Shakespeare was. A few mysterious 16th century jokes and stretches of dialogue were omitted, and sharp modern references (usually wordless) were inserted in the production, but then Shakespeare would have wanted the audience to understand and get involved with the play.  

And they certainly did. Helena was re-imagined as Helenus, a gay Asian man, (played by Ankur Bahl)/  Titania, Queen of the Fairies, was wittily played by the fabulous cabaret singer Meow Meow, and attended by bizarrely painted half-animal fairies of both sexes, bursting with priimitive energy and an utter abandonment, which I feel is how those very un-cute fairies should be played. 

Rather than Athens, the play was set in London, at the Globe, in fact. A bookish, prim and bespectacled Hermia falls for Lysander, a beautiful hipster from Hoxton - one of London's coolest areas -clad in black jeans and a Jack Kerouac teeshirt and preening and posing with his guitar. 

"Night and silence! Who is here?

Weeds of Hoxton he doth wear" 

cries Robin as he finds them asleep in the wood, Hermia zipped into her practical blue nylon tent and Lysander sleeping outside in his underpants.

Out of courtesy for the actors, I didn't photograph during the performance, but here  is Oberon, (a masterly performance by Zubin Varla) smoking a pipe on stage just before the second half begins. 

 I am sorry to say that didn't get any shots of the Rude Mechanicals, who were played as staff from the Globe Theatre, laying aside their mops and brooms to put on some truly excruciating, and very funny, amateur dramatics.   My very favourite character was probably Katy Owen as Puck, solemn faced and pale, with little horns, glittery light-up trainers and a ruff,  leaping and cavorting so lightly that she almost seemed to bounce as she hurled herself about the stage.  

 Everyone was smiling happily as we left, and I realised why there'd been such a long queue for returns, because this really is one to go and see. If  you'd like to read more about the production, here's a link.     And so we returned back to equally crazy London, which did look rather good, with St. Paul's illuminated across the river.

It was certainly a good distraction from the rest of the chaos here. The Prime Minister has resigned, first refusing to formally trigger our departure from the EU.  The main opposition party, Labour, is also falling apart, so at present the country is effectively leaderless. The campaigners to leave EU have been forced to admit that most of what they told the public was pure lies, and that they have absolutely no idea what to do now because they never planned anything.   The stock exchange has plunged like a roller coaster on the downward slope, the pound's exchange rate fell to 1985 levels. Scotland planned to vote again to devolve.   Last night in the European Cup football, England* lost to Iceland (pop 323,000). And the tennis was stopped because of rain at Wimbledon. Then a huge crowd gathered outside the Houses of Parliament protesting against leaving the EU. 

T. and I went for a walk into London, to the Guildhall, where we saw a fantastic display of photos by Martin Parr  He has an uncanny gift for simply catching people as the eat dinner, relax, go on holiday or dress up. They are not exactly artistic photos, but they are kindly and truthful, and often amusing.  Take a look at his website for some of his images, and here is a photo I took inside the exhibition - there was, I hasten to add, a sign saying "Photography Allowed"!.

They remind me of spies or something in a Peter Sellars film, and I love the statue on the right.

On the way home I checked my phone and found things had got weirder.So I will go to bed wondering what will happen next.

By the way, if you'd like to know what the news was that I saw on my phone, click this link from Buzzfeed.  It's not entirely serious. But believe me, you can't be serious about this situation. It is too frightening. I have never known anything like it in my life.  This is surely the biggest ever crisis to hit Britain in peacetime. If you don't laugh you might scream.

Have a good evening!

*thanks, Mike!