Day 1 at Newton House

Sunday:

Newton House is a wonderfully, beautiful estate home which is surrounded by lots of open fields and wildlife: families of deer, sheep and cows. Today’s attraction is a travelling production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A tempest would be described as a big storm out at sea; lots of wind and huge waves and this naturally occurring disaster is exactly what starts of the first scene of the play. The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most reputable written plays and one of my personal favourites.
For this performance the stage was located on the outside of Newton House in the courtyard, or garden. We were not aware of the fact that it would be taking place outside so I was not entirely prepared for it. And lucky enough for us there was a huge down pour of rain. Fortunately I was able to get a garage bag to put on my chair and then I held an umbrella up to cover me, it was still very cold and I don’t know how the actors felt about performing in the rain but they did a very good job in staying focused.
There were points when there was rain and then sunshine and then rain again, times when it was so loud there was about fifteen minutes where I couldn’t hear anything the actors were saying. And then ironically at the end of play when everything was beginning to get resolved the sun came out again. That did tend to happen a lot; the weather flowed with the plot of the story which was amazing to see.
As I sat and watched the performance I couldn’t help but feel like I was back in Shakespeare’s time when the performances could be done in the rain and the audience would get rained on in the Globe theatre. Or back when there used to travelling pageant wagons of actors putting their show and moving from location to location because that is exactly what these actors were doing. It felt like I was taken back to a more simple time when there weren’t elaborate sets and lighting but just the bare minimum and the text and words of Shakespeare.