Good news. There’s a new festival experience for the baby boomer generation who no longer seek the fun of extremely loud groups, of whom we’ve never heard, never mind encountered their music, or floaty girl singer-songwriters, all called Kate.
No longer do you need to clasp your belongings to your chest, whilst the bloke next to you urinates into a bottle.
In any case, you won’t be able to see the noisy band or the floaty girl, because people at the front have raised flags and banners enriched with humorous messages: “Hello Mum!” “I Love Sausages” and “Coldplay.”
Far more pleasurable then, to plant a couple of fold up chairs on the lawn of a country house and experience (I’ve attended all of these, this summer) La Boheme, The Importance Of Being Earnest, Romeo and Juliet, or Cosi Fan Tutte, under the blue-ish skies of the English summer.
In fact, sit down next to me and look: no flags! You can go to the bathroom and you won’t have to queue for three days!
Here’s the best thing – the interval is extended to ninety minutes so we can have a picnic. Bring out the flask of coffee, the tiny sausage rolls, and the M&S fruit salad.
Until this summer, I was unaware that there are now several professional theatre companies, not only surviving but thriving, as they spend all but the most inhospitable months bringing Shakespeare or Mozart to a variety of locations. In the case of the Illyria Company’s Romeo and Juliet, that encompassed over sixty performances from Henley on June 11th to Langoed Schovenhorst in the Netherlands on September 5th, with Penrith, Pontefract and Abergavenny in between.
Such settings may well have met Shakespeare’s approval. Gigging for his companies meant resilience to external noise and occasionally drunken behaviour was a prerequisite. When in 1613, the Globe Theatre caught fire during a performance of Henry VIII, the only recorded injury was that of a man who tried to put out the flames in his breeches by soaking himself in ale.
The audience may not have eaten tiny sausage rolls from Marks & Spencer, but little else has changed in these open air performances, nearly five hundred years later. The behaviour of the audience however, has almost certainly improved manifold.
Play on! And no weeing into a rolled up copy of the Daily Mirror.
Terence Dackombe, September 2010
