12th July 2003

DAMNED WITH FAINT PRAISE

Stafford Festival Shakespeare

Outdoor Shakespeare is a fine tradition of the English summer. It’s an Event: Shakespeare for the masses, Shakespeare escaping the dark fusty theatres, the rarefied spaces of Stratford and London, and popping up in unlikely places. So happy I was to be wandering over to Stafford Castle to the final matinee of Stafford Festival Shakespeare 2003, in the blazing sunshine, under a cloudless azure sky.

To see Macbeth. Hmm. There’s a problem here, isn’t there. Picture this: the audience, fanning themselves with their three-quid advert compendiums – oh, sorry, programmes – fall silent with anticipation, save the occasional sound of a fizzy bottle being unscrewed. The craggy black set stands, ready to receive the players, incongruous amongst the lush grass in the glare of the scorching beams – as if a meteorite with a door in it has precisely dissected the space betwixt the flat-pack grandstands.

Enter three Witches. They wear tie-die grey cat-suits and mince seductively onto the meteorite / heath. Their flowing hair gleams. They deliver their lines oozingly, as if they’re bunny girls to Macca’s Hugh Hefner, prefiguring the jacuzzi / cauldron ooh-grapple-with-our-prophecies scene to come at the beginning of Act Four. We’re surely locked in a weird L’Oreal advert, or else some slightly kinky Texan sun-cult. Here’s the rub: there’s no fog, no filthy air (apart from the exhaust of the OAP-mobile bombing up and down the hill to ferry the less surefooted). Fair is fair and fair is, erm, fair. We’re evidently not on a Scottish heath in the middle of some God-awful cataclysmic storm. Give us grime, give us the grotesque!

We had to adjust to this radiant, daylight Macbeth – entirely authentic, of course, as Shakespeare’s Globe would have similarly started performances at 2pm. But sod authenticity, it just wasn’t brooding enough. True, the eponymous one strode confidently into his role, shedding his “that-bloke-from-The-Bill” tag that might have given us the impression that his one and only skill was loping PC-like into the middle-distance to a fairly – let’s be honest – annoying theme tune. Lady Macca too – I’m sure I’ve seen her on telly – was suitably, um, Lady Macca-like. Her costumes were splendid, including one magnificently sequined gown that turned her into a walking glitterball.

Actually, it was quite difficult to concentrate on them, for there was a play without the play, and a far more entertaining one at that. In all the heat, it became very obvious that people within my vision were literally wilting, their pastel sunhats drooping like thirsty flowers. A member of the audience whose mother apparently needed to be peeled off her seat and doused in some very cold water alerted the usher, who gave the cue.

Enter St John’s Ambulance, in uniforms, bustling. Dramatis Personae: a very capable-looking white-haired man (strong muscular arms, adept at scooping up people with sunstroke, been doing so at major sporting and community events for fifteen years – he must be called Bob), a very capable-looking plump lady in one of those hats (so practical, could put twelve people in the recovery position inside thirty seconds and still have time to make a cup of sweet tea – let’s call her Sheila) and a blonde-haired lad, who didn’t look particularly capable actually, but at least he was carrying that ultimate facilitator of primary care – the cool box.

What were they going to do, feed her quiche and bathe her fevered brow in nicely chilled Blue Nun? It seemed that their favoured technique, gleaned from years of Thursday evenings 7 – 8.30, was proffer flannel and / or glass of water, wait till patient was good for a stagger, then haul her off the stand and bung her in the first aid tent with the others. Sheila looked concerned, Bob (lean on me, duck) looked well within the compass of his powers (just wishing he could unleash their full extent – Heimlich manoeuvre anyone?), blondie just, well, looked. But he had his cool box, and who could begrudge him that.

And there were others – many, many – as if a pair of deities were looming over and having a quick game of Guess Who, arbitrarily flicking us down one by one. At an especially hilarious juncture, swords etc being swung across the stage, a courageous hubby managed to pull his overheated wife off their stand himself, coming to rest at its side, in my line of sight, in a gap the actors frequented for exits and entrances. So, while the thesps played fighting on-stage (very proficiently, it has to be said), a real casualty gasped behind, enjoying the full range of treatments, damp ‘n’ cool … until someone else copped it and the Ambulance of St John scuttled off purposefully to tend another desiccated pensioner, cool box thundering into action, the former casualty left to the vultures hovering above Dunsinane. The fourth wall had been broken to such an extent that I half-expected Sheila to bound onto the stage and assail Macduff with a couple of band-aids and a tube of Germaline.

And so the interval came. We wandered off the stand to stretch our legs, past the field hospital that had come to resemble the WI tent at a village show. A huge queue formed at the beer tent as people suddenly felt the need / had an excuse to hydrate. Talk filling the air was unsurprisingly less about the Costa Del Macbeth we had just been basking in, more about its peripherals.

It was indeed an Event more than a play, enabling the best of British spirit and resourcefulness, reassuring us that fine individuals give up their time to help folk when they keel over. It was an affirming spectacle: the theatre of Shakespeare framed by the theatre of life. If I’d seen it at night, less people would have collapsed and it might have felt at least a little like the Dark Ages. But where’s the dramatic in that?

© Ben James 2003