Cimolino’s Cymbeline works — despite the play

When I saw Cymbeline last night at Stratford, I thought of Shakespeare in Love, the part where Geoffrey Rush’s character, Shakespeare’s producer Philip Henslowe demands a play with pirates, a dog and a happy ending.

There are no dogs or pirates in Cymbeline, but there is just about every other theme or motif from Shakespeare’s other plays, including a happy ending.

I enjoyed the production a lot because director Antoni Cimolino just let the play be what it was. He stayed true to the text and played it straight. This took some doing because there were so many unexpected things happening. Also the tone would change from farcical to serious on the turn of a line.  For example, the beheading of Cloten was a jarring surprise and the Queen’s death was a handy turn which came out of nowhere, not to mention, Belarius’s recognizing Cloten although he hadn’t seen him for 20 years. Nevertheless, Cimolino resisted the temptation to tidy things up or, worse, to send them up.

It seems such a mishmash of a play, I wondered whether Shakespeare had actually authored it (some sources think his Jacobean contemporaries Beaumont and Fletcher had a hand in it) or if he just tossed it off because someone requested it and he needed the money. Unlike the hero of Shakespeare in Love wrestling with writer’s block early in his career, the actual Shakespeare would have had lots of his own previous works to draw on, as the play was one of his last — apparently first performed about 1611.

Cimolino’s production began with Cymbeline, king of the first-century Britons lying in a large (and anachronistic) four-poster bed with figures surrounding him as if in a dream. Therefore the entire play, similar to The Taming of the Shrew, could be understood as a dream, but without a lot of internal logic.  As in the latter play, using a dream format might also excuse the highly misogynistic views of women Shakespeare puts into the mouths of some of his characters.  The late Virgin Queen might not have been amused. Perhaps the unappetizing descriptions of women make Cloten’s death even less mourned and Posthumous’s repentance even more heart-felt, so there is some redeeming dramatic reason for their fervour.

But I actually wonder if Cymbeline might originally have been produced as a masque —James I, along with his wife, was very fond of this form of entertainment. It has the elements of such a courtly pageant: the scenes in the play often seem like tableaux; Wales provides the requisite pastoral setting (and in Milford Haven, a fleeting reminder of Henry VII’s landing there prior to the Battle of Bosworth); folk tales, in this case a wager based on a woman’s fidelity, were common themes in masques; the political subtext around the harmonious rule of a king would have bastioned the new monarch’s view of himself and his subjects.

The appearance of Jove — in this production at the sound of thunder and riding on an eagle with red eyes and flapping wings — would meet the need for elaborate staging. Although there is not a lot of singing, characteristic of masques, the two brothers of Innogen sing a dirge for her.  The masque format would also explain the seeming lack of coherence in the play and the many times only one character is on stage explaining the action.

Anyhow, be that as it may, Greg and I were outsourcing bits and pieces of the themes, characters and motifs of the play to other of Shakespeare’s works as we drove along the Highway 7 — so much so that laughing and talking, we turned too early for the detour at St. Mary’s.  We were soon off track in the pastoral wilds around Fullarton at midnight in the rain.  No pirates or dogs interfered in our little domestic drama, but we did eventually find our way home: a happy ending to an enjoyable evening of theatre.

The Woodleigh Replicas come back to life

 

 We drove to see the Woodleigh replicas again this year because of events that had transpired over the previous 12 months. After we returned home last year, I joined a Facebook group attempting to somehow save them from likely demolition. Here is the link:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151202633876675&set=a.10150825433611675.466263.593756674&type=1&comment_id=8561504#!/groups/17808904425/

The group grew over the year and now has over 200 members, but until recently no one had stepped up as leader. Posts were becoming more and more despondent when, lo and behold, we learned part of the property had been bought by Tim Archer, a country and western singer and producer from Ontario, who planned to restore the property to its former delight.

I was going to say glory, but that is not quite the right word: more about that in a moment. Suffice it to say Tim has his work cut out for him. You can listen to an interview here with Tim here on CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/mainstreetpei/episodes/2012/07/17/woodleigh-replicas---tim-archer/

He has already restored the Blue Dragon Inn, booked solid as a bed and breakfast, by word of mouth, all summer. He was about to walk the current guests’ dog, as we arrived to say hello, but he paused to chat.

 

 

The fountain and wishing wells are working again, and Tim has put back together the cherubic statues tossed into the fountain at some point by local vandals. A team of volunteers has done other restoration work.

Tim is planning a haunted house for Hallowe’en. (I felt the maze planted with pine trees, and now very thickly grown together, was already rather haunted.) At Christmas, he told us he hopes to have a typical English celebration in the farm house and grounds.
 

Just as we were leaving, a well-dressed middle-aged man walked up the lane. He was vacationing from Nova Scotia (his family was waiting in the car), and he said he wanted to revisit the replicas he’d been to many years before. He reminisced that the model of Yorkminster Cathedral was built from stones from Nova Scotia and that it took many years to build in such meticulous detail.

I visited the replicas for the first time in the 1980s. The first time I remember trying to paddle a boat on the pond with my daughter; we couldn’t get it to do anything but go in circles. I think we also had ice cream. I remember her fascination with the Tower of London replica and how she was small enough to follow all the corridors.

 

But I am not sure that the Woodleigh Replicas are really meant for children. You may ask why.

It occurred to me that so many of the people who delighted in the Woodleigh Replicas are now middle-aged. And that our current fondness for the replicas was redolent of nostalgia, which my dictionary describes a longing for home or for an idealized past. In fact, the word is made up of the word for return (nostos) and the word for pain (algia). Nostalgia is something that perhaps very few young children feel, as they are as yet so new to this world. Their hurts and pains are likely more concrete, specific and present.

Nostalgia — the sometimes painful yearning for what is past ― is for older folk. In fact, a subsequent entry in my 1953 edition of Webster’s is “nostology,” which it defines as the study of aging — a term I find so much more poetic than its more modern synonym, geriatrics.

So why do the Woodleigh Replicas tug at our heartstrings? I suppose not only do we have memories of visiting them in happy times with our children, but they themselves are a product of nostalgia. Their builder was Ernest Johnstone, a veteran of World War I who wanted to recapture the delight he felt while touring English monuments and buildings before returning to PEI after that war. He and his son Archibald, a world war II veteran, began to build the first of the replicas in the late 40s after the latter returned to PEI from the battlefields.

 

Their choices (including the previously mentioned cathedral, Anne Hathaway's cottage, Shakespeare's birthplace, Nelson’s monument, the Old Curiosity Shop, Dunvegan castle, and the Tower of London) are sometimes whimsical and certainly idiosyncratic.

Their placement on the grounds follows no particular pattern or plan. And now that the trees have grown up, and the lawn is unmowed, they take on a layer of greater mystery.

They must have meant a lot to both of these battle-weary men — maybe as a symbol of what they had been fighting for in both their wars. Who knows, but I think of it in that way. In any event, they weren’t built originally to be a commercial money-making venture.

 

The replicas are endearing because they were constructed for the sheer love of it. They are evidence of play – play taken very seriously, a characteristic of imaginative play at its best after all, for many of the replicas took years to build. After years of neglect, the mortar is still in pretty good shape, although the thatch on Anne Hathaway’s cottage needs work, and I wouldn’t count on the wood in the floors.

 

The grounds were opened to the public in 1957 and operated for close to 50 years. There were several owners after the Johnstones, the last of whom simply handed the keys to the government in 2008 when he could no longer look after the property and no one wanted to buy it.

My Google search revealed that some of the actual miniatures were put up for sale — a goofy notion if there ever was one. No one seems to have appreciated the true value of these odd structures, as a tribute to imagination and the joy of creation however quirky it might seem to the less imaginative among us.
 

As a commenter said in the  Summerside Journal Pioneer in 2011 (three years after the auction of the property failed to find a buyer), “it is more than a business. It is a work of art, and it should be preserved.”

I second that sentiment, and I wish Tim Archer every success with his endeavours.

 

I make a pastoral visit

Written a couple of years ago but not published, for privacy reasons. "Alice" now lives in long-term care, not all by herself:

In The Country Parson, 17^th century English cleric and poet George Herbert noted the role played by a clergyman’s wife. It  included the “curing, and healing of all wounds and sores with her owne hands.”  The pastoral concerns of a country parson’s wife were still alluded to by Anthony Trollope in his 19th century novels. Alas, I have not followed in the esteemed foot-steps of a parson’s wife to any praiseworthy degree whatsoever.

However, the other day, I did accompany Greg on a visit to take communion to a nonagenarian parishioner I'll call Alice.  Rail thin, wearing pressed jeans and a turtleneck, she welcomed us into her kitchen, where there were several comfortable arm chairs. She turned 94 last June, she told me.  She’s like a lot of the farm women around here — hardy, practical, and long-lived.

Before her marriage many years ago, she grew up in the brick house next door and confided that she was surprised she had not ended up further away from her original home.

Her mother sounds like someone she might have wanted to put at a greater distance. When the latter suspected Alice’s cat of making her ill, she told Alice’s husband to shoot it. Which he did. But he didn’t tell Alice until she pestered him to such a degree about her missing cat, that he confessed. She strode across to her mother’s and said she was never to do anything like that ever again.

Alice has a soft spot in her heart for animals, especially cats. She told us how she once fed a stray and when winter came had it sleep in the shed — in a heated bed she made for it. She took my mother’s cat when Mum could no longer keep her, and Kitten lived a charmed life with a cat bed in every room of the house.  She was recently joined by another cat, a huge gentle Persian; its owner had hit it with a hammer, said Alice. His name is Tarzan.

Alas, Kitten predeceased Tarzan, who is now close to 20 years old. Alice was talking about selling her house and living in town this winter but has decided against it, we suspect, because of Tarzan’s care and keeping. She had to drive him to the vet recently; she prefers the vet located about an hour’s drive away.  Yes, she still drives and gets her own groceries. I meant to ask if she still cleans her own house, which was spotless. She did confess that recently she has felt a bit more tired than usual.

She reminisced about her life on the farm. Before the pipeline came through on its way to London with Lake Huron water, she would get up at the crack of dawn in winter and take the axe to the stream behind the house where she would break the ice, so the cows could have their daily drink.  Then she would carry 30-40 buckets of water back to the barn for the calves and other animals, which were too small to walk that far in the ice and snow.

She and her husband farmed 100 acres of land with soybeans as the cash crop and wheat, barley and oats being other crops to feed the cows, if I heard correctly. He worked all day as a carpenter and evenings on the farm. She did other chores on the farm during the day.  For example, after the beans were cut, she would put the rake behind the tractor and put them in rows hoping they would dry in the sun before it rained, which would necessitate raking and turning them all over again to dry.

All but one of the cows were sold for beef. However, that one was used for milking, which apparently it did not enjoy – it once kicked her niece across the barn with apparently no harm done except to her husband’s slippers which, it seemed, got covered In manure. Alice refused to do any milking, as it made her wrists too sore. 

She also insisted on single beds when her husband’s snoring got too much for her. Her mother thought the marriage would come to an end and told her so, whereupon Alice said, with apologies to Greg for having to hear her say this, that she thought her spouse was quite capable of “getting out of bed and walking three feet across the room.” It must have worked for they were married at least 50 years.

After her husband cut himself badly with a chainsaw and the doctor told him he had to slow down, he built an addition on their house so that in retirement, he could watch the hockey on television and look out patio doors to the fields.  Alice found a lovely stained glass window for the east wall — likely a transom from over the front door of a larger home in the area. The house is like Alice — very well-preserved.  She still has a black dial phone which works (not surprisingly, as phones in those days were solidly made), but she answers on a large cordless phone which must be one of the first models.  The décor is deep red with touches of orange and lots of brass and photos of the days when she looked a lot like June Allyson and her husband looked dapper lounging in a beige suit beside his favourite sedan.

Before we had communion, she cleared the kitchen table of a bouquet of silk sunflowers. We sat at the table and enjoyed communion from the BCP, although I was the only one to say all the responses audibly. Alice reads them silently, as she has a chronic cough she is rather self-conscious about. It was a very pleasant service, and Alice said with the three of us there, it felt more like being in church.

Then we drove her down her long curving lane so she could get her mail; she refused the offer of a ride back because, as she said, she needed the exercise. It had been a delightful afternoon.

Off the Beaten Path to Grand Manan Island

 

We took the back roads from Woodstock to Black's Harbour, thence to Grand Manan Island on the "big" ferry. This is the picture from last year.

 

 

 

This year we were walk-on passengers. Walking on board involved navigating a rather slippery gangplank without much the way of barricades and then getting off ahead of the huge transport trucks and hoping the drivers knew you were there. 

 

This post is mostly pictures - worth a thousand words:

 



 

This well camouflaged cat was asleep in the old dinghy outside the museum. Here is a link with a picture of the museum itself:  http://www.grandmananmuseum.ca/  Apparently the cat visits here and at several stores along the road and can have a snack on the porch or enjoy cosier shelter as needed:

 

 

As for us, when hunger panged, we went back down Highway 776 to the Back Porch Cafe where we had the best chowder on our trip, likely because the fish was just fresh off the dock. It was neither creamy nor made with tomato base, just a plain broth with potatoes and onions.

 

Lots of fishing boats are in the harbour and drydocks, where I think we were trespassing. There was no one there and a gap in the fence:

 

 

 

 

I enjoyed reading the names:

And the local union:

I am not sure what these are:

 

 

Then there were  doorways, front yards and miscellaneous stuff:

 

 

 

A little bit of everything in this yard:  

 

 

Things derelict in the grass: 

 

 





 

 

We stayed at Ingalls Head Cottages run by our friends Ron and Wendy Plyley. Great accommodation, by the way, a stone's throw from the Bay of Fundy.

 

 

 

 This is the bay beside the cottages:

 

 

 

Ron and Wendy toured us around the Island; actually "around" is not literally true, as the road goes from the lighthouse at the north end to the lighthouse at the south end and stops at the cliffs.

 

We went from sea level to vertiginous in about 20 minutes. Incidentally, the museum does a great job explaining the geological structures comprising the island.

 

 

There were about 30 people there when we visited - most were there to see the sun set. A few sat on the very edge  - not something I would recommend as you never know what the under-cliff may be like! Notice there are no fences in these pictures; the one rusty chain link fence which was there gave only an illusion of safety. The Maritimes provides not a lot in the way of protective this's and that's, I noticed; people are expected to look after their own safety. Sometimes that works; other times it doesn't.

 

No one has fallen over the edge here in recent memory, although a shipwrecked soul a hundred years ago crawled up these cliffs and then to a farm house where he was succoured and revived.

 

 

 

 

The sun began to set, and we returned to Ingalls Head with one stop for really delicious ice cream cones - at a mini-putt golf course, which combined daring inclines and curves with lovely old-fashioned perennials. Alas, it was too dark to take a photo by that time.

 

This was our second year on tiny Grand Manan and we still have more things to see and do! Looking forward to next year ... 

Not the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – but close

Sometimes it pays to go off-highway and not stay at the Best Western/ Travelodge/ Holiday Inn/ Day’s Inn hotel. Other times, I’m not so sure. As one of my Sunday school teachers once said, travelling by Holiday Inns is the best way because it is reassuringly predictable. Those weren’t her exact words, but that was her meaning.  

At the time I thought it was sage, if unadventuresome, advice and rather uncharacteristic of someone who, to my mind, was the epitome of glamour and hence, I then thought, more apt to relish the unexpected. But I suppose glamour requires at the very least good lighting and a hair dryer. I am not sure what any of this had to do with religious training except tangentially: the  Christmas story comes to mind, for she and her husband, the Sunday School superintendent, travelled to Florida each winter. I expect there was always room in their inns.

Anyhow, to get back to our recent travels, we left our dessert crumbs behind at the previously mentioned Irving gas station and continued on our way, hoping to make Woodstock, New Brunswick for the night. A sign on the highway near there advertised the Stiles Motel where rooms were on offer from $69.99. Intrigued by the possibility of a bargain hostelry, we turned off the Trans-Canada and followed the local road to downtown Woodstock, a pretty little town spread along the St. John River. At Main Street, only right turns were allowed so we had to drive south. This turned out to be the wrong direction.  We turned around and went north and were about to give up when behind an overhanging tree branch, I spied the sign for the motel.

It must have been in its heyday in the mid-50’s – certainly before the new highway left it in the dust, as it were.  An aerial photograph behind a ficus plant in the office showed brightly coloured cars with fins and clever landscaping consisting of arrow-shaped beds pointing to the hotel. But now, the Mugo pines had grown so tall they obscured the sign advertising the restaurant, road widening had destroyed the arrow gardens, and the "No" of the Vacancy sign was actually unplugged and cob-webbed.

 

 

Sadly our room was like we were: tired. The walls were done in swirly stucco painted a glossy white, like a wedding cake gone awry. Outside, the window had strips of brown paint on either side intended to look like shutters from a distance.

 

 

I was puzzled by the initials in the iron work: no S for Styles. Who had been the original owners?  My next thought was oh dear.

 

 

The current proprietors are from Ontario: an East Indian couple who seemed rather overwhelmed.  Apparently, it is their first foray into the hospitality business.

However, we chatted a bit while Greg signed the register. I asked if they by chance served dinner – the pale blue and dusty pink restaurant was both retro and enormous  – and would they have Indian cuisine. Yes to both questions!  Things were taking a turn for the better. We walked around the neighbourhood for a while and returned for our evening meal, along with a family from Québec and several motorcycle aficionados.

We were seated in the glassed-in porch where, unfortunately, none of the windows opened. It was an unusually warm evening with only floor fans to move the air. One had to be coaxed into operation by our host’s flicking the vanes.  With persistence, it finally began to swirl. No Kingfisher beer, alas, but we were served what turned out to be a really good “Indian platter”: dal, lentil soup, basmati rice and a curry – a welcome change from the usual highway fast-food.  Who knew!

I hope they make a go of it. One is always tempted to give unwanted advice, so I didn’t, but if I had, I would have encouraged them to capitalize on their strengths: a very friendly welcome and great Indian cuisine.  Add to that menu. Renovate a couple of rooms at a time; set aside a couple of rooms for people with pets. Paint the wooden chairs. Clip the bushes, and let the glass brick show forth in all its mid-century modern splendour. 

 

Old motels like these deserve a new lease on life.

Oh yes, Greg left his bathrobe behind the bathroom door and ten days later, when we were making our return trip, we stopped in and they still had it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the way to the Woodleigh Replicas

We will eventually arrive at the Replicas, so do not despair if you are reading for this reason alone. These posts are like the cliff-hanger at the end of the segments of a serialized novel: a tease to keep the reader going.  To get there faster, I will omit some details, including visits with relatives in Toronto and a very enjoyable lunch in Kingston with John Geddes, who amongst other things heads up CanAssist Africa, about which we had a lively conversation.

In any event, on our annual trips to the East Coast, it is always after Quebec City, along the lovely stretch of highway by the St. Lawrence that I feel truly on vacation — no more big cities and traffic jams but soothing pastoral views.

However, a quieter highway brings challenges of its own.

We rounded the corner at Riviere-de-Loup just after noon and headed south towards New Brunswick.  Lots of road construction meant that we eschewed a meal at Tim Horton’s just then, as we couldn’t see how to rejoin the highway were we to leave it.  This was a big mistake, as there are no restaurants on the subsequent stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway.  And while the rolling hills making up the last sputter of the Appalachians provide excellent views, they destroy radio reception and with not much to distract us, we got hungrier and hungrier.

Mind you, we were kept alert not only by looking out for a place to eat, but also for moose. The powers-that-be in Quebec have not seen fit to build moose fences along the highway, and apparently a moose called Prudence is very common there. Her name and picture are on a lot of signs although the moose on the signs has antlers, so I feel Prudence is a bit of a misnomer. We did not see any sign of her, thank goodness, and finally just before we got to New Brunswick, we spied an Irving gas station and restaurant and turned off the highway to eat.

Greg sensibly ordered the fish and chips; I was captivated by a salmon pie with egg sauce. It sounded tasty; I had visions of flakey pastry, a light sauce and delicately flavoured local salmon.  I was so hungry that it was not until about halfway through the meal I realized how wrong that was. Where was the dill, the crunchy onion and celery bits, and the delicious pastried salmon? What were hard-cooked egg slices doing in a pale sea of sauce. Why did the salmon seem tinned?  Silly me (although at the restaurant beside the gas station in Fortune, PEI, you do get an excellent meal — but more on that later).

What redeemed the meal unexpectedly was dessert. Amongst the apple crisp, brownies, and death-by-chocolate chocolate cake listed on the menu, there was, unaccountably, a “gateau Reine Elizabeth de luxe.” (What made it de luxe, apparently, was a layer of mousseline.) I have never before seen a Queen Elizabeth cake on a restaurant menu, and Quebec was the last place I would have expected it.

Not only that, but this spring for the first time in decades, I have twice made a Queen Elizabeth cake.  The reason?  To celebrate Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, first at the Anglican Ladies' Guild and later at  the Horticultural Society's pot luck dinner for weeders and waterers. So my gustatory antennae were up. Although it was against our better judgement calorifically speaking, what else could we do but order a slice and two forks. The cake came with the mandatory coconut-brown sugar icing. What a treat. Only a quick turn under the broiler to brown the coconut would have been needed to boost an 8.5 to a 9.   The sloppy salmon pie and enervated green beans and carrots medley faded from my memory, as we resumed our journey towards Woodstock and a place to sleep overnight.

 To be continued …

Out another door — a meditation on a dream

My body left the hospital for a coffin and a grave.

You crossed the threshold back to life

and left by another door.

You carried a vase for flowers

opalescent blue and elegant,

empty save for a little water.

It puzzled you there were no flowers,

but consider what is in that vase:

My tears are there.

You bear my tears.

They are for you.

I was afraid of too much happiness,

but you were my container in life.

You held my sorrows.

Now you are carrying the tears I shed

while I was dying,  missing you:

Not a nice miss, not this one.

And now, what should you do

in this parking lot on the bare pavement

outside the institutional doors?

Just add your tears to mine.

Let us weep together the many colours of love and loss:

The blue, pink, white and yellow,

a play of colours,

waiting for roses.

And when the tears dry,

go to my grave,

gather my dust,

and treasure it.

Lorna Harris July 27, 2012