Saturday, August 14, 2010
Nature notes
The damp weather has brought back the green onto the lawn and the jelly lichen onto the patio. The end of summer has brought a grey squirrel onto the nut tree with the result that the lawn is now covered with the shells of nut cases which never contained nuts. Are there so many grey squirrels that they are running out of mid-summer grub and so reduced to cracking hundreds of empty nuts just in case? What are they supposed to eat before the nuts come on line in the autumn? I did see a trap for sale recently, £40. But then you have the bother of setting the thing and disposing of whatever (live) squirrels wind up inside. I guess I am going to put up with having all my nuts spoilt. The water lilly, now in its second year, is starting to show a bit of strength. The leaves are bigger, maybe six inches across, and there are more of them. Plenty of attempts to flower although the flower buds don't seem to like rising water level once they are starting to open. The lilly seems to know that when the bud has reached the surface and then switches from growing the stem to opening the bud. So if the water then rises, the bud is swamped, the switch being a one-time thing.
Big decision point this autumn. Is the lilly strong enough to be lowered from sitting on two bricks at the bottom of the tub to one brick?
Yesterday, despite the recent bad visit to the Globe to see half of a bad production of Macbeth, thought to give another play in the same series a go, that is to say, the first part of King Henry IV.
Started off by losing the pub I had marked down between Blackfriars and the Globe and we were reduced to off-licence at the convenience food M&S which we did find. Given that I had not thought to bring a bottle opener and I was not sure what the by-laws say these days about sitting by the side of the road swigging from a bottle of screw top wine, went for a quarter of M&S's finest five year old whisky. Maybe a malt. Certainly much more discrete. Not bad at all, with the only catch being that the thing was done in about 15 minutes. One can see how one might get into bad habits with the stuff.
So climbed into our front row gallery remaindered seats - the best seats in the house as it happens - in a positive frame of mind. All in all, a reasonable effort. The play shone through. Principle fault was that it was too long, a fault which the Globe seem to make a habit of. They seem to think that punters want the full three hours worth. Well this punter thinks that this - and most other plays - can be cracked through in two. Quite enough sitting down at my age and would leave time for a little something on the way home without being reduced to late night bars in Wimbledon. Quite a lot of this hour could be found by pruning back the musical and vaudeville interludes.
Plenty of stuff to interest a modern audience. For example, a leakily plotting Hotspur to his wife, recycled from Seneca: 'Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know;/And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.' Oddly, this did not raise hissing from that part of the female audience of a femmy age.
On the other hand, Hotspur very much the drawing room gallant rather than the battlefield gallant he is supposed to be. He does die as one after all. So when he complained of the king's messenger as '... shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,/And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman', one's first thought that he was not doing badly in that department himself. The Globe seems to have no idea of how to make heroes heroic.
Worcester and Glendower both rather spoilt by caricature. Contrariwise, I rather liked the comic Poins. Don't mind the lower orders acting the fool. Henry IV started very feeble but much better by the end. Harry and Falstaff competent. Mistress Quickly played as an old bawd; a bit too old to my mind. Lady Mortimer in a smaller part rather better than Lady Percy in a bigger one.
Fight scenes difficult to pull off but the Globe did not do a bad job on that front. But it did not seem very sporting for King Henry to field a bunch of decoys at the battle of Shrewsbury (a fielding attested by chronicle, not just bard), with the result that poor old Hotspur wore himself out killing off the decoys rather than killing off the king. Is it the sort of thing one would boast about in the pub afterwards? What would the Homeric Greeks thought of such a ploy? I seem to remember that Patroclus dresses himself up as Achilles when he goes out to fight for the last time, so they were not completely above such trickery.
# posted by Jim @ 4:17 AM 
