Stratford-upon-Avon

SO. Last Tuesday we started a three-day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, home of William Shakespeare. We saw three plays as a program, with lectures every morning to "unpack" the play we'd seen the night before and to prepare for the next one. We conversed with the actors at the pub next to the theatre after the shows. To understate, it was a good time.

The plays we saw were all three parts of Henry VI, rarely performed as a sequence because together they total somewhere around nine hours. Not only is the Royal Shakespeare Company performing all three, but they are performing the fourth and final play of Shakespeare's first history cycle, Richard III - and not only that, but they are performing the other history cycle, Richard II, Henry IV pt 1, Henry IV pt 2, and Henry V, which were written later but come chronologically before the one we saw. They are performing all eight history plays. In a row. For two years running. It is absolutely crazy. And totally, totally awesome. We were so affected - even the Shakespeare-skeptical - by Henry VI that some of us are trying to see Richard III to finish up the cycle. (If you had seen the actor who played Richard, you'd be trying, too - he was electrifying.)

The first part dragged a little - so many names and dates, kings, dukes, rivalries, alliances, bleh - but visually it was fantastic. They rigged the three-tiered theatre (modeled after the kind Shakespearean theatre companies would have used) with ropes, so that actors could swing in from the balconies to clash in midair, or rain down on a castle for a seige. It was way cool. And they had a smoke machine, and the ghosts of past murdered kings and knights would walk by to stare at wrongdoers, or they would climb silently into "Hell," a trapdoor in the middle of the stage filled with lit smoke. The second part was nuts - at one point a bunch of rioters came in kicking around a body with fish masks on their faces. The main event of Part 2 is a populist uprising, so the peasants were made out to be otherworldly hooligans bent on destroying the natural order of the things. It was pretty weird. Richard was in there, in the background, fighting for his father York's (questionable) right to the English crown. But he didn't come front and center until Part 3:

A frenzied, surreal sequence of murders and usurpations, where York is murdered, and Richard's older brother manages to fight his way to the crown and imprison Henry VI in the Tower of London. Richard communicates with the audience for the first time, telling everyone how much he wishes his brother were dead, how much he wishes it were him on the throne, how trapped he feels by the unlikelihood of that dream. The only way to achieve it, he concludes, is to "hew my way out with a bloody axe." So, long story short, he goes up to the Tower and stabs Henry VI a million times. And, oh, man, his speech after he kills Henry - it was amazing. Before dying, Henry invokes the horrific circumstances of Richard's birth - that he was reportedly born with a full set of teeth, that he kept his mother in labor too long, which shriveled up his arm and left him hunchbacked - and so after he has killed Henry, Richard finally shows us the true extent of his rage and just erupts at Henry, at his mother, at his own body, at anyone who has ever called him ugly. He rejects his connection to his brothers and declares himself a single, unique villain, with no ties to the family conflicts of the Henry VI plays. And the actor was so angry. You just got hit with this shockwave of fury and instability and you're thinking, Where did this guy come from?! I mean, he was in all the plays! I did not see it coming! Part 3 ends with Richard cradling his baby nephew in his arms, clearly planning ways to murder it, and in this production, he says, "Now -" before the lights shut down and cut him off. "Now is the winter of our discontent," he was going to say. The first line of his play.

So of course I have to see the next one!!

Stratford itself was also really cool. It was picturesque in a way you'd expect from Shakespeare's town: wooden-eaved houses with white plaster, trees and ivy crawling up the sides of old, old buildings. The River Avon, with swans floating on it. (I wish I'd gotten a picture! "The Swan of Avon" was Shakespeare's nickname.) A lot of the buildings had been converted to slightly hilarious Shakespeare-related tourist shops, like "Marlowe's Restaurant" and "Iago Jewellery," but overall it was a pretty town, and small, which I have decided I love. The first day we didn't do much besides the Shakespeare lecture; it was freezing cold, even by English standards. The next day, though, we walked as a program to Anne Hathaway's cottage, several fields away from the center of town, and Cali and I went on the last day to the Holy Trinity church, where Shakespeare and his family are buried. That was the strangest moment for me, I think: staring at the place where Shakespeare was buried. I'm not really used to thinking about Shakespeare like a man who began and ended - he's always felt to me like sort of a "genre," or a concept.

My Shakespeare in Performance class was also given access to the Royal Shakespeare Company Archive, right next to Shakespeare's birthplace, and we were allowed to look through prompt copies of Richard III, which the director and the stage manager and everyone had used and made notes in, for all these landmark productions of the play. We saw rare pictures and old reviews. We weren't allowed to touch the pages with our hands - we had to wear those disposable gloves, like forensic experts. It was extremely cool.

In addition to all the great Shakespeare stuff we got to do, I had my first scone with clotted cream at Drucker's, a famous Stratford dessert shop (it was amazing! and also I didn't need to eat for hours afterwards, because clotted cream is heavy), Linley House had our first British Indian food (yum), and we took a tour of Warwick Castle, a well-preserved old embattlement with a Victorian add-on, as is apparently the case with many castles around here. This castle was much more touristy than Cardiff Castle was; they had archery displays every couple hours, and there were wax figures in the cooler rooms to show what life would have been like for the Earl of Warwick (who coincidentally played a central role in Henry VI!). They had a ghost tour that was pretty scary: it was in a dark series of passageways, with smoke obscuring people lurking in stained Victorian rags. No matter where you went, someone screamed or jumped out in front of you. I was unwillingly the group leader, too, so I was first to see all the "ghosts." Awesome.

After every play, we walked half a block to the Dirty Duck, a pub where all the actors magically appeared, ten minutes before us even if we power-walked, after the performances. (Meaning, had I done this program next semester, I would have been hanging out with David Tennant. Sigh.) We would stand around nervously or sit if we could find a place, trying not to look like we were looking at everyone to see if they were actors. I told York he was amazing (his death scene - awesome), and I peeked over at Joan of Arc, Charles the Dauphin of France, and a bunch of others, too afraid to interrupt their conversations. Of course, the ones I really wanted to compliment: Henry VI, who was gentle and quiet and hopelessly unsuited for war, Henry V/the Earl of Suffolk (they doubled a lot of roles), who was cute, and Richard, oh man, I wish he had shown up so I could shake his hand for like twenty minutes - of course none of them came to the pub. But it was still very cool to see everyone who had been on stage right there across the room. A bunch of them told us that we were a really good, responsive audience, and that we were motivating them to perform better. So naturally, after that, we felt like the exclusive American branch of the RSC fan club, where it was clearly our job to be the most attentive, involved audience ever. I think we succeeded. In the second part, we were down right there to one side of the stage - I was in the first row - and for a lot of the audience participation stuff, they played to us. Because we were awesome.

We took a coach back to Bath immediately after the end of Part 3, and the whole of Linley slept in until like two in the afternoon the next day. It was an awesome, awesome trip. I didn't expect to love Henry VI as much as I did. I figured, history plays. Ehh. But they were so good. I think maybe instead of traveling while I'm here I should just see a lot of Shakespeare plays, what do you guys think? :)