As our country’s briefly scorching summer shows once again it has too short a date, amongst London theatres news is breaking – Will Shakespeare is returning to Drury Lane!
Here is a picture I took but a few days since, of the newly-refurbished “Temple to Shakespeare” built beside the Thames at Hampton some two hundred and seventy years ago by David Garrick, then the great Shakespearian star and actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre.
This week comes an announcement that at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane – an address where over the centuries the likes of Garrick, Sarah Sissons and Edmund Kean thrilled thousands – the Jamie Lloyd Company will offer in 2025 a season of Shakespeare plays to feature not only Tom Hiddleston and Haley Atwell in “Much Ado about Nothing” – but also the Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver in “The Tempest”
Also next year the Bridge Theatre by Tower Bridge will stage “Richard the Second” with “Bridgerton” actor Jonathan Bailey. Mixing star performers and Shakespeare’s word wizardry in big, entirely “commercial” venues was once central to London’s theatre scene, a world of late so dominated by musicals.
Not that there’s anything wrong with musicals – the Bridge itself lightened the landscape recently with a sparkling “Guys and Dolls’ where it was a joy to watch our Radagrad Danny Mays strut his stuff, while upstream at Drury Lane another Gower St ex-student Craig Gallivan gathered richly comic garlands in the hit show “Frozen”.
It’s just that it’s exciting and refreshing to see the balance shift a little. Tom Hiddleston – alongside his glittering career in TV with dramas like “The Night Manager” and in blockbuster “Marvel” movies – has returned before to his classical roots – a Coriolanus at the Donmar, a return to RADA for Hamlet at the Vanbrugh – but Benedick on this great stage should be really special.
But oh, how much will be the tickets….???
I found myself wondering who was the last prominent actor to perform in Shakespeare at Drury Lane? There’s a nice quote on Wikipedia: reporting Victorian days when a “period of general decline culminated with F.B Chatterton’s 1878 resignation; in his words, “Shakespeare spells ruin, and Byron bankruptcy.” During that fateful season Chatterton produced “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “Cymbeline”, and “Hamlet” – each with a run of just a few nights.
Last month I wandered off to visit dear friends in France, and to explore territory where some of my family have now gone to live – the heart of the Périgord, a village called Saint Léon sur Vézère. Tom, Marie and six year old Célestine have moved into an old, old homestead on the side of a steep limestone hillside, amongst hills riddled with caves occupied since neolithic times. At the base of their hill they have a kitchen garden, where they find stone-age flint arrow-heads, and the occasional roman coin. Exploring the nearby cave system I came across this remarkable cavern, which is known ominously as “La Grotte de Jugement”… If you look carefully at the top right of the entrance you will see a bull’s head, carved it seems in Roman times. There are various explanations as to why the cave is like it is – are those curious pigeon-holes literally meant for carrier pigeons – or did they have other long-lost purposes….?
And while we’re on long-lost purposes, we are due another short “blogoire” episode. The last post you found me a mewling child in a push-chair by the sea at Southsea – this you will find me a scuff-kneed kid in Cardiff, the years immediately after the war. Much of that city centre featured burned-out bomb sites following prolonged Nazi air-raids on the docks, the valleys nearby dominated by blue-grey, man-made hills of coal-slurry from the mines, the notorious “slag-heaps”, fore-shadowing later tragedies.
I remember exploring a bomb-site brightened by a great clump of dog-daisies, amongst the streets of Splott – a part of town where a young local was beginning to be noticed for her mighty singing voice, a lass called Shirley Bassey. Years later in 2004 I watched her perform, still gorgeously glamorous, patting kindly the snowy heads of gentlemen fans, gazing adoringly from the front row during the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary Two. So what was I doing on board the QM2’s maiden voyage?
Suffice to say later issue of the blogoire will have a nautical flavour – for now let’s go back to days when people in Britain lived in real fear of bombs, falling onto their homes out of the sky.
This has been the blog for the summer of 24, so far. Watch this space – the Summer Blogoire Supplement will be along shortly.