"Von der Parteien Gunst und Hass verwirrt/ schwankt sein Charakterbild in der Geschichte" (Schiller about Charles' contemporary Wallenstein; less elegantly put in a prose translation into English, "distorted by the favour and hatred of factions, the portrait of his character flickers through history". Up until a few years ago, I assumed there was at least consensus about Charles I., while possessing "private" virtues (i.e. good son, father and husband), not having been a very good King, what with the losing his head over it, but no, he does have his defenders in that department as well, present day ones, I mean, not 17th century royalist. I haven't read Leandra de Lisle's Charles biography, but I did read her recent biography of his wife Henrietta Maria, which makes a spirited case for her as well. (My review of the Henrietta Maria biography is here.) While I'm linking things, Charles I. inevitably features heavily in two podcasts I listened to in the last two years, one named "Early Stuart England" and thus concluded (it ends with the start of the Restoration), and one ongoing, called "Pax Britannica" and about the story of the British Empire, which has only just arrived at the Great Fire of London; both start with Charles' father James (VI and I), and do a great job offering context and bringing all the many players of the era alive, not "just" the respective monarchs. They appear to be both well researched, but come to quite different conclusions as to what Charles thought he was doing in his final trial in their episodes about those last few months in the life of Charles I. Stuart . (Also regarding where Cromwell initially thought the trial was going.) If you don't have the time for an entire podcast but want to hear vivid presentations of the trial itself and the summing up of Charles I., good and bad sides, that go with it, here is the trial/execution episode of Early Stuart England, and here the one from Pax Britannica.

Now, on to my own opinions and impressions re: Charles I. Which after reading and listening up in the last years on the Stuarts didn't change as much as my opinions on his father James did, but that's another, separate entry, which I will probably write as well. Years ago I thought Charles had a lot in common with his maternal grandmother Mary Queen of Scots - they both died undeniably with courage and flair, they both saw themselves as martyrs of their respective faiths, they both were great at evoking personal loyalty in people close to them - and neither of them was an actually good ruler, not least because their idea of the kingdom and people they were ruling and the actual people differed considerably. Mostly I still think that, though now I also see considerable differences.

Not least because Mary literally became a Queen as a baby, and once she was smuggled out of the country as a toddler, she grew up very much the adored future Queen of France, in France, and some of her later troubles hailed from the abrupt change from the role she'd been prepared for - Queen Consort of a Catholic kingdom - to the one she had to fulfill - Queen Regnant of a by now majorly Protestant Kingdom. Meanwhile, her grandson Charles might have been male, but wasn't expected to reign at all, because he was the spare, not the heir, through his childhood and early adolescence. Not only that, but he was overshadowed by both his older siblings, brother Henry and sister Elizabeth, he was sickly small child and for years not expected to live at all, he was handicapped twice over (stuttering and having trouble walking, with the usual ghastly historical methods used to cure him of both). Mary was a golden child (as were Charles' siblings), young Charles was the family embarassment and reminds me of no one as much as of Frederick I. of Prussia (that's the grandfather of Frederick the Great), another "spare" who was suffering from physical impairments and spent a childhood overshadowed by his glamorous older brother, his father's favourite, with whom he nonetheless had a good relationship and grieved for when he was gone. (Think Boromir and Faramir.) That makes for a very different psychological and emotional make-up, and both Charles I. and Frederick I. compensated later in life, when they unexpectedly did become the heir and then the monarch, by very much leaning into the ritual and splendour of Kingship. No "Hail fellow, well met" type of attitude for them (which for all their absolutism the Tudors were so good at); they were monarchs who rather treasured the distance and remoteness, as if in compensation of all that early ridicule and disdain.

If you're curious about the first Frederick, more about him here. Of coure, he died in bed, having created a new kingdom (and a lot of debts), whereas Charles ended up beheaded, with (most) of his family in exile, his three kingdoms at war and England a Republic (or if you want to be hostile a military dictatorship) for the next twelve years. Some of the reasons for this different results are Charles' fault, but not all. He did live in very different circumstances, not least because he inherited some baggage from the previous reign, fatally a very bad relationship between King and Parliament, and his father's favourite, Buckingham. (In fact, Buckingham managing to be the favourite of two monarchs in a row instead of being kicked out once his original patron was no more was a feat hardly any other royal favourite has accomoplished.) But he also from the get go was good at making his own mistakes, ironically enough at first by being completely in sync with the mood of the times. The peace with Spain was a signature James I. policy and achievement (and a very necessary one at the point he inherited the kingdom from Elizabeth, with both England and Spain financially exhausted by the war) - and deeply unpopular. When young Charles (still Prince of Wales) and Buckingham after their misadvantures in visiting Spain and NOT returning with a Spanish infanta as a bride for Charles went into the opposite direction and became heads of the war party which wanted a replay of the Elizabethan era's greatest hits, Charles was, for the first and last time in his life, incredibly popular. And once James was dead, an attempted replay was exactly what he and Buckingham went for - which turned out to be a disaster. Instead of glorious victories, there were defeats. Buckingham just wasn't very good as either admiral or war leader. And Charles was stubbornly loyal to his fave.

This is a trait sympathetic in a private human being and disastrous in a monarch, because the "evil advisor" ploy is ever so useful if you need to blame someone for an unpopular policy and/or monumental fuckup, and James, for all that he adored his boyfriends, had used it if he had to. Charles I.' sons, Charles II. and James II., drew very different lessons from their childhood and adolescence in an English Civil War, not least in this regard . Charles II. was ruthless enough to sacrifice unpopular royal advisors if needs must, James II. was not and was more the doubling down type, and guess which one died a king and which one died in exile. Buckingham had already been hated under James, but under Charles this really went into overdrive, and there was a rather blatant attempt at getting him killed via show trial when parlamentarians (aware that Charles who refused to let Buckingham go insisted that Buckingham had only fulfilled his orders) thought they had a winning idea by insinuating Buckingham had murdered James (which Charles hardly could cover for), only to find Charles indignantly shot that down as well. Buckingham ended up assassinated anyway, by a disgruntled veteran but to the great public cheer of Parliament, and you can't really call Charles paranoid for developing the opinion that most MP were fanatics not above lying in order to kill his friends with flimsy legal jiustifications.

(Fast forward to Wentworth/Strafford getting killed in just such a fashion years and years later.)

Buckingham's successor as person closest to the King and accordingly hated for it was Charles' wife, Henrietta Maria, and here we have shades of Louis XVI., because in both cases the fact these two Kings didn't have mistresses and were loyal to their wives worked against them and contributed to the wives fulfilling the role of the royal favourite in getting blamed for everything going wrong, and there was an increasing amount of things going wrong. Leandra de Lisle points out that actually, far from dominating Charles and making him do her bidding, Henrietta Maria had to live with the fact that Catholics under Charles had it worse, not better, than they had lived under James I., because no, Charles wasn't a crypto Catholic. Going all in with the High Church idea and the bishops etc. together with Archbishop Laud wasn't in preparation for an eventual return to Rome. Which didn't make it better in terms of the result. It was one of those head, desk, moments demonstrating what I said earlier, that Charles kept misjudging what the people in the countries he was ruling wanted and were like (he really seems to have thought it was all a couple of troublemakers in Westminster that objected, but really, out there in the countryside, etc.).

Now, for all that he spent his first three years as a toddler in Scotland, he had otherwise zero experiences of the place, and none of Ireland, so he has some excuses there, and like I said, I can understand the emotional background to the increasingly terrible relationship with the English Parliament. But it still means he failed at his job, to put it as simplified as possible. There were monarchs before and after who were also absolutely and sincerely convinced they were God's anointed (and knew better than anyone elected). Elizabeth certainly thought she was. And most of her favourites were deeply unpopular. (It's telling that the sole one who wasn't, Essex, was the one ending up rebelling and getting executed.) But she was aware she had to woo Parliament now and then to get what she wanted in terms of budget. And she was really good at a mixture of prevaricating, not allowing herself to be pinned down in one particular corner. Charles I.'s near unerring instinct for finding "solutions" to his problems that made things worse, not better, and then refusing to offer scapegoats or listen to advice that required a complete reevaluation of his own beliefs was a fatal combination of traits which, again, would have well fitted a private citizen - but not a monarch in early modern England.

So did Charles leave the country something other than a Civil War in which some 6% of the population died? (Hence the "man of blood" label, though of course it's a bit rich coming from the likes of Cromwell - just ask the Irish.) An A plus art collection, and I'm not just being flippant. He had superb taste in paintings, not just in terms of dead and already declared great painters but of his own contemporaries. (Charles I. as a nobleman and patron without royal responsibilities - say, as the King's younger brother he was originally supposed to be - , would probably get an admiring footnote in any cultural history.) The idea that monarchs/heads of government can be put on trial and held reponsible not by other fellow monarchs but by their people. (Well, in principle. In practice, the trial in question was extremely questionable from a legalistic pov, not least because it wasn't even conducted by the actual elected Parliament but by the leftover "rump" that remained after having been purged by the military of anyone who might disagree. Hence Charles, who like grandmother Mary was at his best when backed into his last corner, pointing just this out as if he was a trained lawyer. Stupid, he was not. Whether that makes his previous fuckups as a ruler worse is for you to decide.) Anyway, I would say that the National Assembly putting Louis XVI on trial had a better claim of being actually representative of the country AT THAT POINT than the Rump was of Civil War England. And both trials presented an intriguing paradox, to wit: a) the monarchs they judged were guilty of at least some of the accusations - Louis XVI HAD conspired with foreign powers against his people in his last two years, Charles had, among other things, restarted the Civil War after it had already been believed to have ended, but b) any just trial should allow for the possibility that the defendant could be found innocent, and there was no way in either trial that would have happened, the only acceptable outcome was a guilty verdict and a death sentence, because the accusers and the judges were one and the same. (One of the podcasters disagrees and belongs to the school of historians who think hat if Charles had submitted to the authority of the trial and had entered a plea, he wouldn't have ended up executed, btw.)

(BTW, Robespierre originally was, unless I'm misrenembering, against a trial against Louis XVI for that reason - not because he didn't want him dead, but because, and here his inner lawyer spoke, a trial should allow for the possibility of innocence, and if Louis was innocent, the entire Revolution was wrong, which could no be, hence there should not have been a trial.)

Charles to his last hour did not consider himself guilty in the sense he was accused of being. He did think his death was divine punishment, not for failing his people - he thought, as mentioned, he had done his best throughout his life, and it wasn't his fault that it hadn't worked out - , but for letting Parliament bully him into signing the death warrant for Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Stafford, a man he knew to be innocent and to have been condemned just as a lesson to him. This, he said in his final speech, was why his fate was deserved. I think this perspective both shows why I wouldn't have wanted to be ruled by him, but why I also think he was, as a human being, a far cry from our current lot of autocrats who wouldn't know how to spell guilt and responsibility, be it personal or political.

The other days

I can spend a few days in London right now, and that already meant two plays.

Globe Theatre: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Rarely performed these days, and actually one I never read, which is one of the reasons why I used the chance to watch it in an afternoon performance, that and the way watching plays at the Globe, in a perfectly reconstructed Elizabethan theatre, has yet to cease being special to me.

( Shakespearean Spoilers have mixed feelings )

The Garrick: Mrs Warren’s Profession

One of George Bernard Shaw’s early “problem plays” and scandals. (He wrote it in the early 1890s, and except for a club performance in 1902, it would take two decades to make it to the London stage. By contrast, it was already performed in Germany in the 1890s as well. Legendary producer Max Reinhardt was a big Shaw fan and so were a lot of Wilhelmians.) This production is starring Imelda Staunton as the titular Mrs. Warren, and her real life daughter Bessie Carter (known to the general audience probably best as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton) as Vivie Warren; the director is Dominic Cooke.

( Shavian Spoilers argue about the ways of making money )

Having thus watched Shakespeare and Shaw, I have on my schedule next: Robert Bolt, and then a new play, which from the sound of it is Shakespeare/Marlowe slash, starring Ncuti Gatwa as Kit M. Stay tuned!

Aka the pictorial results of my latest time in the British capital. Despite the occasional rain, it was mostly sunny - and fun. I did return with the unfun sort of cold, though, but never mind, it happens, especially in autumn. Now, photos!



( London Town in photos )

I wll say something about the swap suggestion that inspired this question at the end, because I have my own opinion about it, unsurprisingly, but first, here are some spontanous 18th Century ideas from yours truly. I tried to pick contemporaries of the same generation:


( Kingdom Swap 1: Friedrich Wilhelm I. (Prussia) swaps with his first cousin George II (Britain and Hannover) )

( Kingdom Swap 2: Stanislas I. Poniatowski (Poland) swaps with Joseph II (HRE) )

( Kingdom, err, Realm Swap 3: Peter the Great (Russia) swaps with Gian Gastone de' Medici (Tuscany) )

Now, what thornyrose42 wrote to me was: I was listening to a podcast (You’re Dead to Me) where a comedian quipped that Peter III of Russia and Frederick the Great would have both been quite satisfied with a kingdom swap, since Peter admired Prussia so much and Frederick would not have said no to such a giant hunk of Empire.

Whether or not that is true, what do you think would be some of the best and worst kingdom swaps from your favourite periods? Whose style of governance was much better suited to another kingdom’s problems? Who managed where they were ruling but would have floundered when forced to deal with someone else’s political brew.

( And okay, Peter III and Frederick are contemporaries but of two different generations, but here's my own opinion of how that would go: )

The other days

Flying back to Munich this afternoon, I leave you with some visual impressions of my time in London, with a brief excursion to Winchester, and to Greenwich.




( More below the cut )

Sunday was a bit gloomy, weather-wise, but Monday was sunny, and thus I did again something I hadn't for two decades and went to Kew Gardens. Then, because it was such a fine day, I added something I hadn't done during previous London trips, full stop, and took the boat on the Thames instead of the train in order to get from Kew Gardens to Hampton Court. (Aka how the the kings and queens and their courts did it.) Of course, by the time I arrived in Hampton Court clouds had gathered and I was a bit frozen, but never mind, it had been worth it. All in all, it was a great way to say goodbye to London for this year, although not quite, because in the evening I went to rozk's book launch, which was fabulous. Now I'm off to the air port, but won't be able to resume my fannish life until next week because tomorrow I'm bound for Prague! (Where I was only once in my life before, and then I was 13, so I hardly remember anything.)


Meanwhile, share the beauty of gardens, mansions and palaces, not to mention the Thames:





( More beneath the cut )

Not to go all Robert Browning on you, but I'm off to be in England, now that April's there. Well, London for a week, but it's going to be fabulous, it always is.

Being less online will also mean less of a (mis)chance of getting spoiled for Age of Ultron before I have the chance to watch it, which will be soon, since it will be released in Europe tomorrow. But it does mean that Americans aside, which Itunes has, I won't be able to catch up with my shows untl next week. Will report on London in April instead!

Overheard, just the other day, near Marble Arch while having lunch, the following conversation:

Aged Father: "What about the Roma who were here last time?"
Daughter (my age, Tory politician). "We're not calling them that, Dad, we're calling them agressive beggars of Eastern European Origin. And we got rid of them."

And thus you know you're surrounded by conservative England. There was a lot of interesting talk during that lunch otherwise, on all types of subjects from the EU to Dickens to Thomas Mann, but that part was the only point where I felt positively Orwellian.

Thursday also saw me watching Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play written by Gina Gionfriddo and performed at Hampstead Theatre. It occurs to me that means that out of five plays I watched during my time in London, three were written by women (Red Velvet, A Taste of Honey and Rapture - Blister - Burn, respectively), and today I also watched a film, The Invisible Woman, which was written by Abi Morgan and based on the book by Claire Tomalin. The times, they are (hopefully) changing. Which was partly the subject of Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play starring Emilia Fox (which is why I went) and Emma Fielding, and focused on women and their choices, and different generations of feminism. ( Rapture-Blister-Burn with spoilers ) It's not a play that offers some amazing new insights but it it's one that offers a very funny depiction of the inevitable imperfection of current day female life (in all its variations). Who says feminists are without a sense of humour?

Thursday was very rainy, so I first went to the National Gallery (me and half of London, but as opposed to the National Portrait Gallery, I hadn't visited the NG for years, and I did want to see some of these paintings in non-printed form again), which was, despite all the other people, a very relaxing thing to do. When wandering around the Impressionists, I was struck again by how many of them sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Britain, which was probably the most sensible thing to do, but can't have been that comfortable an exile, since they all went back once it was over.

Then I watched The Invisible Woman, because non-blockbuster foreign films which weren't co-produced with German money take sometimes a year or so before they get shown in our cinemas, and I really wanted to see this one, for various reasons: I had read Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography, which impressed me in its even handedness and vivacity, Claire Tomalin's report about how the film came to me, and the various reviews which assured me on what were the two most criticial points for me in advance to know: that this film would not excuse Dickens' behaviour by demonizing or denigrating his wife, that it would not play out Nelly against Catherine, on the one hand, but on the other that it would also manage to show just why so many people cared about Dickens as a person, not "just" as an author. (Because otherwise Nelly looks foolish.) And because Nelly's personality always eluded me in the biographies, I hoped for the film, which is after all fiction, to help out there. Which it did. ( The Invisible Woman with spoilers )

My last London play this year was The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, which is an addition to the Globe; an indoor Jacobean playhouse where the Globe company can now stage plays in winter, too. I had tried for the Duchess of Malfi, their first play in the new house, about which I'd heard great things, but it was completely sold out, so last night I could watch the premiere of the next play, Beaumont's rarely performed Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had never seen it on stage before, and haven't read it though I knew one or two scenes from books about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre - since it is a play-within-a-play type of drama, which breaks the fourth wall with gusto, it gets quoted as an (of course dramatically exaggareted) example of what the stage practice of the day would have been. As it turns out, it is ideal for this particular theatre, which is build similar to the Swan in Stratford, only completely in wood, modelled on the Blackfriars Playhouse. So as opposed to the Globe, you have this relatively small space, with the basic archetectural structure of a refectory with a nod to an alehouse, all in wood. I'd been warned about the hard seats, but let me tell you, for the Bayreuth-trained theatre and opera enthusiast, this was downright comfortable by comparison. Also the play was very much about audience participation; the other thing I was told was that for the Duchess of Malfi, everything was completely dark except for the candles used for lighting. Not so here; the doors were always open, partly because at some points the characters ran off stage and through them and back again, but also because the audience reactions were part of the play so you needed the audience to be visible.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents you, among other things, with a London citizen, a grocer, his wife and his apprentice going to a play, not being content with what they watch as they don't like the hero and taking over the plot, inserting a new character, their apprentice, in it who is to have all types of glorious adventures which suspiciously resemble Don Quixote (a book which was out in Spanish but not yet in English at the time so there is some debate whether Beaumont had read it) while the actors try to stage their original play (which is about a London merchant's apprentice being forbidden to marry said merchant's daughter and after all sorts of shenanigans getting together with her anyway), which doesn't fit the demanded adventure plots at all. It's the kind of thing which sounds hopelessly confusing when written but when staged as it was last night really is hilarious, with the whole audience cheering Rafe on when he has his Quixotic adventures and adoring the Citizen and his Wife who were the heart of the performance and sat among the audience commenting when they weren't on stage trying to help the actors/their characters. They are basically Jacobean fandom living the fans-know-everything-better-anyway dream (which tells me Francis Beaumont must have been lectured by fanboys and fangirls a lot), and presented with great affection. Instead of the usual break ca. halfway through a play, for this play we got three interludes that lasted about four minutes during which there were on stage dances, and during which also food and drinks were sold as well (yes, you could, in the true Jacobean spirit, eat and drink during the performance, though at one point one of the actors of The London Merchant went down to the Citizen's wife and took her food away, and one longer, fifteen minutes interlude announced as "privvy break". Like I said, this was pretty much the Rocky Horror Show type of live performance audience experience, Jacobean style, and terrific fun from beginning to end.

Today: the sun has come back! Will walk a while before heading off to the airport - my flight is in the afternoon. What a trip!

Yesterday was actually a sunny day, and I met the St. James pelicans on my way through the park.

I always visit the National Portrait Gallery when I'm in London; it's less crowded than the National Gallery, and it appeals to the historical obsessive in me. This time, as it turned out I could also visit the exhibition showcasing David Bailey's work over the decades, Stardust. There is an undertone of "I didn't just photograph the 60s, you know" there, but then, it's true. Mind you, whether 60s, 80s or 2000 onwards, what's undeniable is that black and white is Bailey's metier; the occasional colour photograph simply isn't as effective. The title not withstanding, the exhibition doesn't solely consist of Bailey's celebrity photos; there is one room with showing his photos of New Guinea people and Australian Aborigines, neither of whom are treated condescendingly or in any different from the way he photographs Western people, and another with his contribution to Live Aid which was to go to Sudan and document the situation there without fee. But inevitably, this being David Bailey, two thirds of the exhibition show people which one does know. (Well, I did, anyway.) Two of the most interesting portraits to me which I hadn't seen before were photos Bailey did of fellow photographers, of Don McCullin (probably most famous for his Vietnam work and in this the antipode of Bailey in terms of subject matter in the 60s) in the 90s, looking craggy and sage and yet somewhat amused, and of Linda McCartney in 1985, the face unabashedly without make-up and showing every line of a woman in her mid forties, and strong in herself for it. Incidentally, in terms of self portraits, Bailey's are a mixture of unflinching sense-of-humor about himself - the more current day ones not only are as unflattering as possible but also tend to have him posing as a clown, all grimaces, puffed up cheeks and nose - and youthful showing off; there is one photo of the young David Bailey lounging in bed which is amazingly sexy and makes it understandably why supposedly two thirds of his models ended up having sex with him.

His favourite band, the Rolling Stones, get their own room (the notes informing us that David Bailey first met Mick Jagger when they were dating the Shrimpton sisters, Jean and Chrissie, in 1963, and that they're friends till this day), but in terms of his older work, the non-Stone photos are more memorable; another part of exhibition shows the "Pin-Box" collection he published in 1965 which had most of Swinging London (some of whom remained famous, and some folk who have since fallen into obscurity) in it, including the most notorious gangsters of the day, the Kray twins. Now I had seen Bailey's portrait shot of Ronnie and Reggie Kray before (and so have you, if you've seen photos of the Krays at all), but what I hadn't been aware of was that he took that photo in session with all three Kray brothers (yes, there was a third). Older brother Charlie was subsequently edited out of all the pictures (the exhibition has the originals, though), since no one cared about him. I sometimes wonder whether it's the awareness of who the Krays were that make me imagine you can see the cold brutality in the eyes, a certain psychopathic blankness, and whether I would read the photographsh differently if they were labeled "Ronald and Reginald Smith". But I think not; Bailey, at his best, can get across much character in his pictures.

Among the today obscure/forgotten people from the 1965 Pin-Box is for example Gordon Waller (of Peter & Gordon); among the still instantly recognizable one of the most famous pictures ever taken of John Lennon & Paul McCartney. So I knew that one, of course, but what I hadn't known was that Bailey also took portrait shots of Brian Epstein, three of which are included in the exhibition, two regular shots and a double exposure portrait, all excellent. It's worth noting that while the exhibition has several portraits of Jean Shrimpton, there are none from the photo shooting that made Bailey famous in 1962 (maybe Vogue still has the copy right?).

From photography to theatre: after visiting the National Portrait Gallery, I headed off to the other side of the river to see King Lear at the National Theatre, starring Simon Russell Beale in the title role, directed by Sam Mendes. Which was a very strong production, even if I'm still uncertain about some of the choices. Mendes went for a vaguely 1940s - general 20th century look, military dictatorship instead of traditional monarchy; interestingly, the French forces under Cordelia are clad in a brown guerilla look while the English ones both under Lear and later under Albany and Edmund are clad in a fascist black. Beale's Lear, as most good Lears do, starts very unsympathetic and gets more and more human and pitiable as the play proceeds. When he first says "let me not go mad" it's also the first time I felt any sympathy for him. Mind you, the autocratic behaviour in the opening scene of course means Lear comes off badly towards Cordelia and Kent however you play it, but in this production he also came off badly towards Goneril and Regan, with no warmth towards them yet expecting them to love (and proclaim their love for) him, plus the production had the hundred knights really rowdy (and, remember, in sinister black) at Goneril's, so Goneril feeling threatened and wanting to get rid of them in addition to having a strained relationship with her father was understandable. When Lear curses her, you can see how terrible this is for her. And then, like I said, the first human moment: "Let me not go mad". And suddenly Beale is projecting this fear, the moment of awareness, and it's so relatable - the fear of dementia, of Alzheimer's, of your own body and mind betraying you, of the helplessness when everything threatens to be taken away.

This is a production that feels very fast paced, but not in a bad way, as things go from bad to worse in both the Lear and the Gloucester plot; the suspense never snaps. Two outstanding moments in the first half before the interval - Gloucester's blinding, with the servant's intervention given its dramatic due when most productions I've seen tend to get that moment over with very quickly. (I think it's a great touch of Shakespeare's, especially given the "even if the King's cause is wrong, our duty towards him absolves us from any blame" debate in Henry V, because here you have a character who is not a noble going against the rule of duty and obedience because he can't stand seeing a man tortured this way. Also, before the blinding there is waterboarding as Regan and Cornwall interrogate Gloucester. Obvious contemporary nod is obvious. And speaking of Regan and Cornwall, usually because Regan moves on quickly to Edmund and is the less present sister in any case she doesn't get more emotional range beyond sadistic sex kitten; here she's sadistic and enjoying sex, but she's also sincerely in love with her equally cruel husband and devasteted when he's killed, desperately trying to stop the bleeding and save him. (She's also played by Anna Maxwell Martin of Bletchley Circle fame.)

The other outstanding scene, and a production choice I'm not sure about, is the climax of Lear's mad scene just before the interval. In the text, he stages a mad mock trial of his daughters. "Is your name Goneril" etc. In Sam Mendes' production, he doesn't just mistake a stage prop for Goneril, though he starts out with that. No, he then ( does something spoilery and unique to this production ) Then again, madness. I just don't know.

Later Lear also acts kindly towards Edgar-as-Tom, and towards Gloucester, which shows why Cordelia and Kent love this man (which is important; if you play Lear as solely bad, which I've also seen - and Jane Smiley does it in her modern Lear, A Thousand Acres, where he's a daughter rapist to boot - then not only there's no tragedy but it doesn't make sense anyone would feel love and loyalty for such a man). And the reconciliaton scene with Cordelia is outstanding; I have never seen a production where not only there is a Lear reluctant because he's so ashamed at how he treated her but also Cordelia who on the one hand loves and pities him but on the other is scarred by what happened herself, and so there is physical distance and uncomfortableness and slow, slow getting closer, so that when they do at last embrace, it is incredibly moving.

Always a question for actors for Lear: are you on the one hand old enough not to need ghastly make up but on the other strong enough to carry your Cordelia on the stage? Beale is up to the job. I've seen Lears drag their Cordelia because carrying an adult woman in your arms is no mean feat, but he accomplishes it. He's also one of the Lears whose "look there, look there" isn't a comforting final delusion that Cordelia still lives and starts to breathe again,but a despair about her death. It's heartrendering.

I haven't said much about the Gloucester plot, which is partly because it contains another of those choices I'm not sure about. Now this production's Edmund (Sam Troughton - a relation, I wonder?) with his sleeked back blond hair is slick enough in the machinations early on but also presented as a cold fish, which, fair enough, it's just that you have a hard time seeing why Goneril and Regan (both played by charismatic and beautiful actresses conveying much emotion) would fall for him. And in the later half, Mendes cuts Edgar's narration of Gloucester's death (so while on the one hand he adds ( that spoilery thing from the big madness scene ) on the other he lets Gloucester survive), and thus also Edmund's moment of being moved by it and the following not exactly repentance but at least attempt to take his orders for Lear's and Cordelia's deaths back. Also cut is Edmund's possibly vain and/or possibly being moved remark re: Regan's and Goneril's demise, "so Edmund was beloved". In short, those slight touches which don't make Edmund less of a villain but do make him human.

These caveats not withstanding, it is an excellent Lear, and I'm glad to have watched it. Onwards to more London theatre!

Tomorrow, I'll be off to London for a few days, which is great on a theatre, books, friends meeting level, but alas there is that pesky British weather. However, I shall try to model myself on Gene Kelly.