Roaring Meg Brings The House Down

Of course it should have been a balmy summer evening, the sun sinking slowly into a furnace of copper, chilled Pinot Grigio on the castle terrace and a light zephyr breathing the warm balm of Sicilia over the assembled company. But that was asking too much.

We went in the Company of Upstager and Zebskid to Goodrich Castle last Saturday evening for the specific purpose of getting a good soaking and incidentally to watch the Rain and Shine Theatre Company perform the Winter’s Tale. As they say on the quiz shows: the clue is in the title.

Rain and Shine are an excellent troupe who perform Shakespeare and other classical plays in a rumbustious, burlesque, street theatre-ish style. Lots of noise, lots of clever and comic ‘business,’ minimal staging, deliberately hammy acting and audience involvement: the actors (well, two of them) fancying a drop of wine during the performance and helping themselves to the remains of someone’s picnic, for instance. Well worth seeing; more: well worth going an hour’s drive to see. Even in the rain. Even when the rain itself was over-acting.

I had never seen the Winter's Tale, so that was a first for me, and, given the generally humid ambiance, not one I am likely to forget. I actually enjoyed it, though I did, I confess, as the rain started to descend in stair rods during the last half hour, wish that the final scene would quickly draw to a close so that we could all go home. "Yes, we know the statue is real!" I wanted to say, "so you can skip the gradual warming up bit." Only when I started drying out did I discover how wet I was.

We sat, on seats brought especially for the occasion, next to a seventeenth century mortar called Roaring Meg. A squat, tubby black thing that looked almost benign and resembled an iron toad. It had been cast locally when the Parliamentary commander besieging the Royalists of Goodrich began to lose patience. So with Meg’s helped he lobbed a few 200lb gunpowder filled shells into the castle and the walls, in true Biblical style, came tumbling down.

I couldn't help thinking, watching the droplets of rain swirling on the wind like snowflakes in the luminescence of the spotlights, that the play might have been performed before, in this same castle courtyard or in the adjacent hall, in happier times, before Roaring Meg (why are cannons always female?) brought the great castle towers tumbling down.

I couldn't, either, help falling into my Lettice role and picturing the hall tables piles high with hedgehogs, puffins and coneys, or the Virgin Queen descending the grand castle staircase during one of her progressions around the Kingdom and slipping on the same wet stones stones as us.

I can't think of another country, other than Britain, where there would be shown the same spirit - not only of 'The Show Must Go On' but also of 'The Show Must Be Watched.' And as it ended and we packed up and waded back the long quarter mile in the darkness to the car park, cold and soaked, I knew I was glad to have gone. There is more to theatre than ice cream in the warm trappings of the grand circle.