A hot day, but Bullingdon'd without trouble from Grant Road East to Vauxhall Cross and from the Albert Embankment to the Hop Exchange, the two stands nearer the Globe being full, perhaps of all the holiday makers going to the same place and causing me to be somewhat late for my rendez-vous. I also had to hump a rather heavy bicycle down some steps to the river and managed to walk into the side of a van: I was intending to cross Southwark Bridge Road (on my way back from the Hop Exchange) behind it as it traveled south, but misjudged the distance and was rather too close as it veered sharply to the left and brushed against me as I stood, at the cost of a mild abrasion to the right elbow. And so onto the Globe where I took a couple of glasses of their vinho verde to recover equilibrium - decent but dear. Pleasant if noisy bar overlooking the river, with cooling breeze off the river.
Show itself not bad, although it must have been quite heavily cut to get it down to three hours including interval, a length which I could manage quite well with a cushion. My front seat was between the entrance and a pillar which meant I had plenty of space and a good view, but the distraction of all the comings and goings in the entrance, as pitters came and went - for a fiver a pop one might well just pop in for a few minutes just so that one could say that one had been. A bigger distraction was the full on afternoon sun. Sunglasses did not work as they meant one could hardly see the stage, but the paper hats provided by the volunteers, helpfully lurking below me in the entrance, did, and the chap behind me assured me that I was not blocking his view. Quite a lot of noise from the auditorium - including a good crop of inappropriate collective titters - which meant that mobile phones going off - which quite a few did - did not irritate as much as they would have done in an indoor theatre.
Good costume and set, with the former mainly vaguely Jacobean for the men and mainly vaguely Egyptian for the ladies. Unobtrusive, as it should be. They had song, dance and music but went easy on it, so that was fine too. They ran around a lot, adding to my usual difficulty in grasping the words, thought by some to be the main attraction - but not, presumably, for most of the aforesaid (foreign language) holiday makers. They laid the humour on a bit heavy, with Antony in particular, to my mind, rather overdoing it. But I did like the sense I got that Antony and Cleopatra, while indulging in grand passion, were also grand-standing, that the grand-standing was an integral part of the grand passion. Not something that I had thought of before.
Octavius rather good but Enobarbus was not quite right and there was the usual problem with the Globe that the actors and actresses did not convince as serious players, as movers and shakers in their world.
A large helicopter interrupted one important speech by Cleopatra and a seagull another, but she, Eve Best that is, managed to work round both rather well, albeit at a cost of raising a laugh at a wrong time.
Illustration take from the National Gallery of Victoria, who also offer a lot of interesting drawings by the same Tiepolo. This painting being of a Cleopatran banquet, another copy of which was included in the programme. It also rather good, including a cut down version of the sort of stuff you get in the Arden edition. Maybe as many as half the pages about the play, rather than about the Globe or advertisements and good value at £4.
Bullingdon'd back from Bankside Mix to Waterloo Roundabout to pick up a rather splendid fruit flan, a sort of higher grade Bakewell tart, from Konditur & Cook (http://www.konditorandcook.com/). And so endeth the outing to the Globe.
PS 1: checking afterwards in Baring-Gould, I find the action spread over half the Mediterranean and more than ten years, some way from the theatrical ideal of one action, one time and one place (see Ἀριστοτέλης, aka Aristotle). And that the marriage of Antony to Octavia produced a grandson who went on to become the Emperor Claudius. Antony was quite a fertile chap altogether, marrying five times and having one child by the second, two by the third, two by the fourth (Octavia) and the last three (of those recorded) by the fifth (Cleopatra). While of three grandsons to Octavius and Scribonia (the second of his three wives, the only one to produce), two died young and one was imbecile and had to be murdered when Octavius died.
PS 2: so one adaptor takes ten pages of Agatha Christie and makes it into sixty minutes of television. Another takes ten years of history and makes it into a hundred and eighty minutes of theatre. From which we deduce that Agatha could average around three pages a year.
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