In the meantime, I had learned that they play was derived from an old Italian fairy story about another king with three daughters, with the favourite getting into trouble for offering her father water and salt, rather than something a bit fancier. Type 923 in the Aarne-Thomson classification. Shakespeare varied the original by making the two elder sisters bad rather than good and by considerable elaboration of the plot.
I started the proceedings by visiting the photographic exhibition in the Lyttelton foyer which had been puffed in the Guardian. Very arty landscape photographs by one Charlie Waite (see http://www.charliewaite.com/, individual tuition available), some of which were inaccessible inside some private function or other, some of which looked to have been extensively touched up in photoshop (see http://www.photoshop.com/ to find that the idea that the camera never lies is some way off the unvarnished truth) or some such and all of which were very artily printed & framed. I did not like many of them and I certainly did not like the price, maybe £750 for number 45 of a limited edition of 50. But I did get to see the conical reed huts in the Libyan desert which had featured in the Guardian.
And so into the Olivier, where I had a theatre buff from Cheltenham on my left and two ladies who did not go the distance, leaving at half-time, on my right, and one of whom was making herself a nuisance with her smart phone until just before the off. And then we had one quiet but persistent ring from behind me and one very loud musical ring in front of me during the proceedings. The lady owning the loud musical ring left the auditorium to answer it and then had the sauce to come back in - if it had been up to me she would have been denied re-entry.
In sum, the second visit was well worth it. This second, evening performance seemed sharper than the first, afternoon performance. Edmund, for example, seemed more convincing. Stronger sense of Lear, Kent and Gloucester being yesterday's men. That said, the second half sagged a bit, which it had not on the first occasion and the tragic ending was neither as gripping nor as shocking.
One oddity towards the end was that the bit when the repentant, dying Edmund tells Edgar to send to stop the murder of Cordelia seemed to go missing. Perhaps I missed it; it seems to be a rather important bit to go missing. Checking the script, I find that a good chunk of the Edmund-Edgar part of Act V, Sc. III seemed to have gone missing. I missed the sense of it being a knightly challenge, a cut down version of the knightly challenge between Bolingbroke and Mowbray in Richard II. With Edmund graciously waving his right to know who his challenger is. I then wondered how much one performance of a play of this sort might differ from another from the same production. Do bits just get missed out sometimes?
But maybe the play is too long to be performed without some serious surgery, so the director is free to do a bit of pick-and-mix to get the play that he or she thinks that it should be. Rather different in that respect from music from the classical repertoire, with performers there being expected to respect the score, to stick to the score. No pick-and-mix for them.
Maybe also this brain is too old to process Shakespearean sentences in real time. A lot of it only works when I have done some preparation, certainly that was the drill when my mother used to take school parties to Stratford. It seems unlikely that I am alone in this and maybe that is part of why, for example, the wicked sisters sometimes seemed to put more effort into their hips than their tongues. In any event, a little late in the day, I shall now put some quality time into my Arden (illustrated above), an Arden which had once belonged to a young lady who was promoted from VIB in Room 9 to VIA in Room 2 during her term of ownership. Did she forget to return it to their school library?
Home to be irritated by a piece in the paper about the shocking state of child care services. What on earth do people expect to get when they don't pay the sort of taxes needed to provide proper public services? Let them look forward to what they will get when said services have been flogged off to the private sector and they get even less bang for their buck. Or are these expectations merely the product of journalists in search of copy? Have the public actually made a choice; they would rather have the pound in their pocket than in that of some poor sod of a social worker trying to sort out some drink & drug fuelled mess on some bog standard estate? And then irritated by another which tells me that a slice of our presumably badly stretched police budget is to be spent on banning kat (and upsetting another minority), at a time when plenty of civilised people think that we should make such stuff legal, and some civilised states actually are. See http://www.legalhighsforum.com/. Followed in the morning by yet another piece about Boris backing some ridiculous garden bridge. Is there no end to which the vanity of politicians cannot be turned?
PS: only a modest amount of smoking in this show. Didn't feel that they were really putting their hearts into it, just going through the motions to preserve the privilege.
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