Prospero's cell

As I'd hoped, the Wanamaker is a cabinet of wonders, box within box.




And tiny:  negothick 's seat was in the opposite gallery, and we could look across and catch each other's dizzy grins.  We saw The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, both blissfully uncut—"every 'leven wether tods" and all. Not that The Tempest wasn't beautifully spoken, down to the smallest part, but the moments where I died of bliss were visual, and the simplest effects.  The storm was done by actors hurling themselves, though it looked as if the motionless stage were a deck and hurling them—heaven knows how much tumbling practice that took—and aloft in the near-darkness, you saw a great lantern swaying madly, as if it were at the masthead, and riding that was Ariel.  Gorgeous.




The spirits who brought the Tantalus feast, were all in grey-white, and wore their masks facing backward, arsy-versy, so that they moved contrariwise, disjointedly, as if they'd scuttled out from under Caliban's woodpile.  The Romans would have called them Larvae:  spectres, goblins, ghosts.   And the dance of the nymphs and sicklemen was perfect emblem-book—the men in golden masks, with golden ears of wheat, immortalizing what they'd slain.   Only afterward I thought of Traherne:  "the corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown..."

The Winter's Tale was uneven:  their Leontes unmemorably feeble, their Polixenes, too grandfatherly; but Niamh Cusack did a fierce Paulina.  Their Hermione stood trial with passion.  And James Garnon (I'd seen him on stage as Fabian in Twelfth Night and on screen as a volcanic Caliban) rocked as Autolycus, the cheeky beggar.  When he said, "


—only wickeder.  Much wickeder.

And everywhere, elusive, was the scent of smoke and honey.



 Nine