Southern Sonoma Country Life

A Midsummer Night's Tea and a Vibrant, Modern & Inventive Open Air Afternoon Performance at Shakespeare's Globe

Whenever I am in London, I make a date with my dear friend, Bev, who I met in journalism school in Harlow, Essex in the late 80s. We pick out something special to do together for the day and given that Bev lives in the greater London area, something central is usually on the cards. This summer, we opted for afternoon tea at stylish and super-view positioned Swan on the South Bank by the Thames for lunch, followed by an equally memorable matinee performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream right next door at Shakespeare's Globe theatre, Bankside. 

Located at the iconic Shakespeare’s Globe, Swan is a stunning Bar and Restaurant set over two floors, with great views of the river and St Paul’s. It's open all day serving modern British food, high tea and available for morning breakfast to evening cocktails and everything in between. Despite its touristy location it's a smashing spot to celebrate something fun or special, or just to hang out. A proportion of the revenue from Swan goes to the Shakespeare’s Globe Trust, a charitable organization set up to further the experience and international understanding of Shakespeare in performance.

How could we resist? Swan’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream afternoon tea is inspired by the journeys of the characters: from the pea flower of Oberon’s love potion, the apricots Titania feeds to Bottom and mulberries from the lovers’ tree.

Love may not look with eyes, but beautiful traditional tea treats, presented on bespoke crockery designed by Annika Wester, are almost too pretty to tuck into. If you go, for tea or other refreshments at Swan, click here. 

No photos are allowed during performances in the Globe, but the school groups who were enthralled by the modern, upbeat and creative production of A Midsummer Night's Dream were clicking away on their phone cameras before the show started, so I snapped a couple of quick pix to show you how fantastic the reproduced Globe truly is. I have toured a couple of times with the boys when they were younger, but never had the time to catch a full performance. It was well worth the wait! 

Go London described the producers as having: "created a carnivalesque atmosphere, with fairyland an explosion in a neon-coloured dressing-up box." And The Guardian: "The fully populated stage looks like the clean-up operation after Pride. Bafflingly, fairy queen Titania lives in a flower-laden recycling bin, her fairies resemble the results of a hurricane in a craft show, and Bottom’s ass is a papery rainbow piñata. The direction is sometimes scatty and the fairy scenes feel like filler, rushing through the words in favour of visual spectacle."

But I thoroughly enjoyed it and so did Bev. We thought it was brilliant in that the hundreds of school kids in the largely open-air audience were thoroughly enthralled and rapt by this up-to-the-minute take on one of Shakespeare's most fantastical tales. And isn't that just as fantastic in this day and age? None of them were looking at their screens once the cast took to the stage. It helped that the whole cast could sing and contemporary music made it all the more compelling for those who might otherwise have wished they were anywhere other than stuck in a theater watching Shakespeare. 

If you go, plan your visit ahead of time by clicking here.  

This landmark attraction along the South Bank is actually the fourth reincarnation of what was Shakespeare’s original theatre. London’s first purpose built theatre was on Curtain Road in Shoreditch in the 1500s, and named “The Theatre”. Shakespeare began his writing career in earnest and his earlier plays were performed here.

The Bard and his company are believed to have run into trouble with their landlord and were forced out of the The Theatre until one of the group spotted a loop hole in their contract and discovered they actually owned the wooden structure. A plan then emerged. According to info on the Swan's website, it was over the Christmas holidays while the landlord was away that Shakespeare and his company literally stole the theatre over the course of four nights and when the weather improved and the river Thames thawed they floated the timbers across the river on barges, over to the Las Vegas of London, Bankside, on the south side of the river.

It took seven months to rebuild The Theatre, renamed The Globe, presumably so no one would notice they’d stolen it. The Globe ran from 1599 until 1613 until an incident involving gun powder and other over-zealous special effects caused the theatre to burn down during a performance of Henry VIII.

The replacement Globe was rebuilt within a year, however this time with a tiled rather than thatched roof. Although Shakespeare died in 1616 the Globe continued without him until the 1640’s when the puritans took hold and all the theatres were pulled down.

It wasn’t until the 1940’s when American actor and visionary Sam Wannamaker came to London and was shocked to find nothing but a small plaque to commemorate Shakespeare’s work in London that a decades long campaign was launched to rebuild the Globe, which finally began in the early 1990s. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre that we know today, the fourth of its kind, opened in 1997, half a century after Wannamaker’s campaign began. 

 

Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, Starring Clove Owen, Lia Williams and Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn

With time in my travel schedule for just one West End play (plus an afternoon performance at Shakespeare's Globe), imagine my delight when Clive Owen popped up on my play search newly staring as a suitably disheveled the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon in a summer opening of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, joined by a cast including the super talented Anna Gunn (Skyler White of Breaking Bad fame), Lia Williams and Julian Glover? Everyone has a heart-throb actor, or should have and Clive is mine! Though I've seen him in theater in a Pinter Play on Broadway in New York, the last time he played London's West End was in the wake of 9/11.

The Night of the Iguana was first staged as an one-act play in 1959, before eventually settling on a three-act play in 1961. A film adaptation was released in 1964, starring Richard Burton as Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon. This is one of Williams' lesser known works, though it has been revived numerous times across the West End and Broadway, with actors including James Earl Jones, Eileen Atkins and Alfred Molina all having a The Night of the Iguana credit to their name. This new production includes a star-studded cast of a similar calibre and a terrific set design which transports audiences to the 1940s to meet a clergyman at a hotel in Mexico, who has recently been ousted from his religious circles for referring to God as a “delinquent”.

Facing an identity crisis, Owen is imperfectly convincing as the unbalanced reverend who takes on a new career as a tour guide. As the story unfolded, I learned a lot more about the other people at the hotel including the manager and a group of German tourists, especially when a torrential storm loomed over the area. Anna Gunn's Maxine, the hotel's widowed proprietor is no slouch on stage and Lia Williams was also great as the nomadic artist and granddaughter of a basically homeless nonagenarian poet, played by veteran English stage, tv and film actor and recipient of the Laurence Olivier Award, Julian Glover. There's a deep sadness surrounding the captivity and projected fate of the iguana on the one night that brings all the characters together and ultimately leaves them all forever altered. 

Watching a play written pre-1960s that is so full on WITH political incorrectness was a bit flinch-worthy. A young German woman sitting to the left of me voiced her discomfort at Williams' portrayal of German tourists, prompting a brief discussion during the interval as to post Second World War attitudes and stereotyping. Similarly, The Reverend Shannon's backstory would blow up a Me-Too backlash if it were today. 

Playing at the Noël Coward theatre, London, until September 28th, 2019. 

 

 

 

Rupert Brooke's Grantchester

It was poet and idealist Rupert Brooke's picture-postcard Grantchester long before it was the brilliant, charismatic, crime fighting fictional character, clergyman Sidney Chambers', lead of the popular Masterpiece tv series set in the quiet Cambridgeshire village of the 1950s. 

Still, the two seem to co-exist peacefully in the long, lazy, summer shadows that stretch across the green meadows by the River Granta attracting visitors to this sleepy little setting situated about two miles up-stream from Cambridge.  

James Runcie is the son of ex-Archibishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. His six book series The Grantchester Mysteries was first published by Bloomsbury in 2012 and is currently airing its fourth series on U.S. television.

Grantchester was the site of Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlements and it was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. Queen Elizabeth I processed through Grantchester en-route to Cambridge from London in 1564.

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, son of the public school housemaster, in 1887. He was considered a young Apollo for his striking good looks and golden hair and said by the poet W.B. Yeats to be the handsomest young man in England. He won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where lectures on Literature, Philosophy and Art were of most appeal to him. Brooke enjoyed a big group of eclectic friends, including the writers E.M Forster, Henry James and Virginia Woolf and playwright George Bernard Shaw. 

His tutor recommended he move out of Cambridge to focus more fully on his studies. In 1909, Rupert Brooke took rooms in Grantchester in a former farmhouse called The Orchard and later, next door to the vicarage. This was a serene and gloriously happy time for him, walking, camping out under the stars in summer, berry and fruit picking. 

After the start of the First World War, a by-then world-traveled 27-year-old Rupert Brooke was posted to Belgium. He wrote and published numerous war poems, including The Soldier. In 1915 his troop ship sailed to the island of Skyros, Greece, where he died after developing septicaemia from an insect bite. He was the first Fellow of a Cambridge College to die on active service in the First World War and Winston Churchill wrote his obituary. 

I'm a big fan of Rupert Brooke's poetry and Sydney Chambers of the Grantchester television series (played by the handsome James Norton) and so I was more than happy making a pit-stop in the village this July while traveling from my parents' home on the Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire border, south to Kent, to visit one of my sisters and also my sister-in-law.

After a pot of tea in a deck chair the bucolic gardens of Orchard House and a walk along the river, the sight of a big group of people gathered outside of the vicarage and church had me wondering if there was a walking tour I hadn't read of. Turns out it the production crew was on location that morning making plans for the upcoming shooting of Season Five of Grantchester. A brief chat with one of the producers informed me that it takes one week to shoot the Grantchester scenes of an entire series, with locals appearing as costumed extras. 

It must be a bit of nuisance to villagers to have their narrow streets and pubs and church commandeered for a whole week, but I'd imagine charitable causes such as the church fund benefit from the production fee. 

Grantchester is just enough off the beaten track to remain a glorious, gorgeous, unspoiled English village of the story books. If you go, do plan on a cup of tea at The Orchard Team Room & gardens. 

                                                                                                                                      Rupert Brooke 

Grantchester's Robson Green as Detective Inspector Georgie Keating & James Norton as Sidney Chambers

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
(Rupert Brooke, Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
                                 ‘Du lieber Gott!’

 . . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve. . . . 
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"

 

 

British Fashion Icon Mary Quant Whose Designs Are Still Fresh as a Daisy — Visiting an Exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

"The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone," 

Mary Quant

From miniskirts and hot pants to vibrant tights and makeup, Mary Quant took the sixties by colorful, riotous storm, launching a fashion revolution on the British high street and around the world. An exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London showcases over 200 garments and accessories, including unseen pieces from the designer's personal archive.

I was lucky enough to be in London for a few days of selfish pursuits which was a rare commodity for me in the midst of an overdue extended family trip to Sicily and the UK and a multi-generation family reunion to celebrate my dad's 80th birthday.

Inventive, opinionated and commercially minded, Mary Quant was undoubtedly the most iconic British fashion designer of the 1960s. A design and retail pioneer, she popularized super-high hemlines and other irreverent looks critical to the development of the 'Swinging Sixties' scene. Exhibit fashion collections include examples of her famous designs from across the 1960s and 1970s, on loan from women who responded to a call for original Quant designs hanging in their wardrobes. 

I'm not sure if my mum had any original Mary Quant outfits in her closet during the years of my childhood, if she did, she didn't hang on to them, but she certainly dressed in the Quant style and likely bought affordable Mary Quant tights and makeup. 

Quant was a self-taught designer, attending evening classes on cutting and adjusting mass-market printed patterns to achieve the looks she was after. Once technically proficient, she initiated a hand-to-mouth production cycle: the day's sales at Bazaar paid for the cloth that was then made up overnight into new stock for the following day. Although exhausting, this cottage-industry approach meant that the rails at Bazaar were continually refreshed with short runs of new designs, satisfying the customers' hunger for fresh, unique looks at competitive prices.

Quant's developing aesthetic was influenced by the dancers, musicians and Beatnik street chic of the Chelsea Set, and the Mods (short for 'Modernists'), a subculture that helped define London's youth culture in late-1950s Britain, with their love of Italian sportswear, sharp tailoring and clean outlines. Quant's first collections were strikingly modern in their simplicity, and very wearable. Unlike the more structured clothes still popular with couturiers, she made"relaxed clothes suited to the actions of normal life". Pairing short tunic dresses with tights in bright, stand-out colors – scarlet, ginger, prune and grape – she created a bold, high-fashion version of the sorts of practical outfits she'd worn as a child at school and at dance classes.

Quant is frequently credited with inventing the decade's most iconic look: the mini-skirt. Who first took hemlines north of the knee is up for debate, but she certainly was one of the frontrunners. 

Capitalizing on the sixties love affair with new materials, Quant was the first designer to use PVC, creating 'wet look' clothes, and different styles of weatherproof boots in her footwear range, Quant Afoot.

As London's boutique scene continued to build, Quant was cementing her position as a commercial and cultural powerhouse around the world. In 1962, she signed a lucrative design contract with American department-store chain JC Penney.

In 1990 Mary Quant was awarded the prestigious Hall of Fame Award by the British Fashion Council, recognizing her outstanding contribution to British fashion. She published her second autobiography in 2012, and became a Dame in the 2015 New Year's Honors list.

The printed dress above was made for the American market in the seventies. It would not look a stitch out of place today, lovely fall colors!

Red and white platforms are a little too rock and roll for me but I would love a pair of these multi colored heeled sandals and a red pair with ankle straps further on.

The Manhattan is perhaps my favorite. 

The Mary Quant exhibit runs through 16th February 2020. If you go, tickets are 12 pounds and it's a good idea to click here and book ahead to avoid lines or disappointment if the museum is too full. 

Mary Quant smashed fashion norms and traditions and her designs still have a lot of influence on contemporary designs.