A Winter's Tale, Theatre Royal Nottingham, 28 March 2012

C wanted to go and see Shakespeare‘s “A Winter’s Tale” at The Theatre Royal, and of course I agreed to go with her. I have, in the past, actually enjoyed one or two Shakespeare plays (I think) so I decided give it a go. How open I am to new experiences, even at this ripe old age!

On the other hand I haven’t got to the age of 61 without learning something about what I am likely to enjoy and what I’m likely to find tedious.  And god was this tedious! I really should, by now, have more sense than to put myself through 3 hours 10 minutes of Shakespeare! It was like the cello concert we had to attend in the fifth form followed by several West Bridgford School concerts I attended as a parent followed by a very long Holy Communion service.

It takes some 15 minutes to get your ear tuned to the anachronistic language. Then you wonder why you bothered since Mr S seems to work on the maxim of ‘why use 2 sentences when 202 will do?’ (In fact it now abundantly clear to me that the main reason he invented so many new English words and phrases was that he'd used up all the existing ones in Act 1.) The play started prompt at 7:30 and it took until nearly 9 pm for the king to alienate his best friend and his adviser, banish his baby daughter, see off his wife and son, and realise he’d been a total twat. All of which could have been achieved in 15-20 minutes with judicious editing.

In fact I looked at my watch at 8:55 and decided that perhaps there wasn’t going to be an interval, so long had the first half dragged on. But no, the lights went up and the curtain came down. At this point C and I discussed whether the outcome was going to be Redemption or Downfall. I predicted that the lost daughter was going to marry ex-friend’s son.

I made the big mistake of not getting up for a walk around, little suspecting that I was going to be stuck in my seat for another 1 hour 40 minutes, a total of nearly 3-and-a-half hours of sitting by which time I was literally squirming to get comfortable as a twinge in my right thigh turned first into an ache and inevitably into a desperate screaming cry to be released from its sedentary prison.

After the interval, some 16 years have gone by. (Plot time, not subjective time.) I was interested enough in the outcome not to feel sleepy, but frankly couldn’t have cared less as, sure enough, the ex-friend turns out to have a son who is courting the king’s teenage daughter, the friend is reconciled with the king, and the king’s wife inexplicably turns out not to be dead after all. (Redemption, then.)

What made the second half even longer was the padding! We got Morris dancers. We got singing. We got poetry. We got a new ‘comedy’ character totally irrelevant to the plot. (Some people laughed but I have no idea what at.) We didn’t even see the reconciliation scene, but just heard about it second-hand. And the ‘happy ever after’ ending was too twee to believe. Better the king died a horrible death at the hand of his ex-friend’s armies; he certainly deserved it, even after a 16-year penitence.

So I don’t think I’ll be going to another Shakespeare play in the near future. Maybe not another play at all, unless I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, since this is 2 duff plays out of two so far this year.