Arsenic and Old Lace at Colchester's Mercury Theatre was brilliant. I'd seen it about three decades ago, and all that I could remember besides the fact that it was about two old ladies who poisoned lonely elderly men with arsenic (which isn't really a plot spoiler since the clue's in the title) was that it was very funny. It is a black, manic farce with some great wisecracks and one-liners, and the Mercury does it proud, with a pacey production and a splendid gothic set. The author, Joseph Kesselring, never wrote anything else that was remotely as successful. A well-constructed farce is a wonderful thing. The protagonists, while mad, should behave consistently in character, and each sudden entrance and plot twist should follow from what has gone before. You can't have any soldiers on horseback in a good farce.
The only worry before the start was the couple to one side of us. Both were immensely fat, so that the lady threatened to spill into my chair (luckily I am rather small), and before the play even began she had complained that the haze might trigger an asthma attack, and giggled that she didn't know how to switch her mobile phone off, while her companion made ponderous observations about the set. She let out a shriek in the dramatic opening, and I thought for a moment that our evening's viewing was doomed, but after that they were quiet until the interval and it was OK, apart from the fact that she didn't shrink during the course of the evening.
Today, with time to spare before my lunch, I nipped into the Guildhall Art Gallery. The current temporary exhibition is of a living painter John Bartlett, whose extraordinary narrative paintings are fixated on the paranoia of modern urban life (quote). I was one of two visitors, so I don't think that one is taking the art loving public by storm. I did feel I was being Told Stuff about Social Issues, and would have preferred a little more wit, or ellipsis, that allowed me to work things out for myself instead of beating me over the head with them, or failing that a more sensuous use of paint. I wandered around the permanent collection as well while I was there. There is some rather nice modern stained glass in the front of the gallery, in the form of tall thin windows to various guilds, including gardeners and waste disposal people.
After lunch I went to see Shakespeare:staging the world at the British Museum, which is my absolute favourite museum at the moment. I love the great court, the gift shop, the permanent displays, the way they do temporary exhibitions, the whole shebang. I haven't been to a dud show there since they started staging them in the reading room, and today's was no exception. We got things you'd expect, like books and letters, several swords and daggers (feature a lot in Shakespeare), household objects of the time like a clock, and displays to illustrate the scope of Shakespeare's world, encompassing Venice and Virginia, as well as the importance of Warwickshire to him. The extent to which the history plays were used for coded discussions of political issues that could not be spoken of or represented directly was raised, with an eclectic collection of objects including witches' charms (Macbeth) and a tiny stone relief of the suicide of Cleopatra. There were film clips of Royal Shakespeare company actors reading from some of the plays, and plenty of quotations on the walls (and as we know, Shakespeare wrote largely in quotations). There were also some quirky little oddities, like a seventeenth century schoolboy's cartoon scribble of his teacher. It is a very interesting, well put together show, and you wouldn't need to be a dedicated Shakespeare scholar to enjoy it. It's on until 25th November so you have no excuse not to go. I didn't book in advance, and was able to get in straight away, and it wasn't too crowded.
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