In Which I Spend Money As A Substitute For Doing Something

 "I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight." - Charles Dickens

It's been difficult to get the wargaming mojo fired up this year, real life events having taken the edge off things. As a group we have resumed playing games, but there has been a long hiatus in my own painting and modelling. I have decided that the best way to overcome inertia is to willingly walk straight into what is normally a wargamer's biggest mistake; I shall start a new period. 

I have had a long-standing urge to get some figures for the Mexican Revolution, and already own many sets of rules and not a few cacti. I was tempted some years ago by Peter Pig's comprehensive range, but everything else I own is in 20mm. However, I have recently picked up some 20mm figures (a mixture of EWM and Shellhole Scenics) on eBay, not ridiculously cheap but reasonable value. 

The bag bottom left isn't part of the purchase, it's a sample pack from Jacklex. In for a penny, in for a pound. There may be prompt updates showing progress in all this, or just as likely, there may not. 

Milan 1630

I bet you all looked at that title and thought I was going to write about military history, or perhaps I was about to start wargaming a new period. However, and temptingly obscure though the War of the Mantuan Succession would be, neither of those is the case; you know me better than that.

I have been reading Manzoni's 'I Promessi Sposi', the classic of Italian literature which, on the off chance that you don't know it, is a bit Walter Scott, a bit Dickens or Thackeray, but perhaps mostly like Tolstoy. The author dedicates the whole of Chapter 31 to the arrival of the plague in Milan in 1630, and much of what he writes seems worryingly familiar. For example:

"The infection entered through the inadequacies of the edicts, negligence in carrying them out, and adroitness in eluding them."

Plus ca change.

2 Chronicles 21:14

Your bloggist is a notorious Billy No-mates, and is therefore as psychologically prepared as anyone for self-isolation. But just to be sure I have put some cultural fuel in the tank to see me through.

Opera: I saw Opera North's excellent new production of Kurt Weill's 'Street Scene'. They have a real flair for musical theatre and for his work in particular. I wish they would revive their production of 'One Touch of Venus'. I also saw OperaUpClose's 'Madam Butterfly'. It was set in modern Japan and the scenery was quite reminiscent of the poor neighbourhood in 'Parasite' if you've seen that. As usual with that company I really enjoyed the small scale and intimacy, but - and it's a big but - they changed the ending. How can you change the ending of Madam Butterfly? I also saw a concert featuring various Baroque works including Purcell's 'The Yorkshire Feast Song', which was apparently commissioned for the annual dinner of the London Society of Yorkshiremen in 1690. Clearly the bastards have been banging on about how wonderful they are for centuries; although now I've written that I don't know why I am in the slightest surprised. Also on the programme was Handel's 'Eternal Source of Light Divine', a setting of the poem by Ambrose Philips. Whilst Philips was no great shakes as a poet, he was the original 'Namby-Pamby'; don't tell me this blog isn't educational.

Theatre: I saw a very fine, very dark version of 'Oliver Twist', by Ramps on the Moon, a company which mixes D/deaf, disabled and able bodied actors in productions which build captioning, sign language and other forms of accessibility right into the fabric of the show (see here for their version of 'The Threepenny Opera' - also, satisfyingly, composed by Weill) . In a way this production was the opposite of colour blind casting, with the actors' deafness being the crucial link that held Fagin's gang together. The Artful Dodger teaching Oliver to sign was as central as teaching him to pick pockets. Bill Sykes is one of the most terrifying characters in literature and drama, and the effect is only heightened by him not speaking. Also up was a really different take on 'Pride and Prejudice' with an all female cast giving us the sweary version that one must assume Jane Austen would have written were it not for all those boring nuances of etiquette in place at the time. I won't write a review (read this one if you're interested),  but it was just brilliant and laugh out loud funny all the way through.

Film: Jane Austen popped up in the cinema as well, with the current take on Emma being well worth watching. I thought that they managed to capture the essence of the characterisations - notably Mr Woodhouse's hypochondria - without reams of exposition. I mentioned it above, but 'Parasite' is obviously rather good, in an Alfred Hitchcock sort of way. Whether it's the best film of the last year or so is less clear. I also caught up with 'Rocketman' and thought it was great. It's fascinating that it and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' tell stories with some similarities of narrative and theme in such different ways.

Let's finish with some music to cheer us up. This is Townes Van Zandt and 'Waiting Around to Die':

Gut Yontiff

“There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

                 - Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

WB Yeats and The Second Coming

"Throughout the whole absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living."

                                         - Albert Camus

W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                                      - W.B. Yeats

News of Ciaran Carson's death came on the same day that I attended a discussion to mark the centenary of Yeats' poem, held by Irish poets and academics John MacAuliffe, Martina Evans, Alan Gillis and Colette Bryce. To mark his passing they read from his work, with the final poem of the evening being 'Fear', whose opening two lines I have always rather liked:

I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.

What Carson is saying is that the human mind, being either incapable or unwilling to face up to the infinity and emptiness of time and space and our own insignificance in it as mere pawns of fate, chooses instead to focus on those smaller, more immediate risks which we think we can control. For me there is also an element of this in Yeats' much quoted (and much more quoted since June 2016) poem. The reason for the concept of a second coming (or its equivalent in other religions) is precisely to put some sort of end point on our current situation. But the poet is also saying that when the apocalypse comes - and it will come because it always has before - it won't be in one big bang, but rather in a series of mundane problems of the type we face every day anyway: the falcon will not hear the falconer for example. In other words, we may not recognise it when we see it; indeed, we may have already failed to recognise it.

The panellists wisely steered away from Yeats' peculiar love life, his spiritualism and his anti-democratic political views and focused on his craftsmanship. Whilst arising from the context of the end of the Great War, the struggle for Irish independence, the Bolshevik revolution etc, the poem is timeless and relevant to any age that fears and foresees an impending calamity; which, of course, has been the case for all civilisations throughout history and will continue to be so until man finally annihilates himself completely.

I won't attempt to summarise the wide-ranging discussion but it covered areas as diverse as the Riddles of the Sphinx (I didn't previously know that there were two), Brueghel's painting of Icarus (reproduced in this blog post about Auden's poem), and the band Uriah Heep (unlikely ever to be mentioned further in this blog unless I get round to writing a post about how I spent my 8,000th day alive), to the effect of becoming a father on middle-aged men (if you ask me the first ten years are the most difficult, and the subsequent ten years are the most difficult as well).

Uriah Heep

Let's finish with another Irish poet, again writing about a specific event, but with universal applicability:


Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

                      - Seamus Heaney

Pot79pouri

You will all be seriously concerned that I am going to review in great detail the whole of my cultural life during the period of enforced absence from the blog. Happily even I am not that cruel. There were of course many highlights in the 3 operas, 12 plays, 4 gigs and 2 films that I managed to squeeze in because, thankfully, my long vision was unaffected by the spectacles debacle. However, 2001; A Space Odyssey wasn't among them. I'd managed never to see this before so was keen to catch the 50th anniversary restored print on the big screen. Dear, oh, dear; what a load of old rubbish, and I don't exempt Leonard Rossiter's Russian accent from that criticism. Does anyone know why the astronaut doing the EVA flew the small pod further away from the bit he wanted to repair than he was prior to launching it before getting out to spacewalk back? No wonder the AI thought it had a chance of winning.

I shall instead mention a few which actually are worth, er, mentioning:

• The post-Bazza Northern Broadsides' funny and poignant version of 'Hard Times' with all the usual music and dancing.
• Noel Coward's 'Nude With Violin', which demonstrated that the master had a similar view of modern art to me, but also rather disappointingly demonstrated that he couldn't think of any wittier way of expressing it than saying "Anyone could have painted that" over and over again.
• An amateur production of the musical "Sweet Charity" that gave the young(ish) mothers of Ilkley the chance to unleash their inner dance hall hostess, with frankly terrifying results.
• 'Celebration', a Waterhouse and Hall play that not only did I much prefer to 'Billy Liar', but which to anyone like me who grew up in a large extended working class family in the early sixties was as if one's past had come back to life.
• English Touring Opera's very funny take on Puccini's 'Gianni Scicchi'

Boardgaming is also difficult if you can't see (especially given that I can't tell the difference between colours half the time anyway), so mostly I didn't bother. I did however join a few of the erstwhile Ilkley Lads for a game of the new reprint of Medieval. The game was punctuated by one of the players regularly falling asleep before waking up to demand to know what was all that stuff going on with removing map tiles from the board. For those who haven't seen it, removing map tiles from the board is in fact a major part of the game. Despite that - and only partly because I won - this game is highly recommended and is hereby added to Epictetus' list of boardgames that will appeal to wargamers. Another game on that list is Condottiere, which I have previously bigged up here only to find out that it was out of print. Well there is good news as it is being reprinted, including rules for a new 2-player variant. Details - except sadly for the timetable - can be found here.

And no post at this time of year would be complete without one of these;

2017

I have had better years, but I suppose I should be grateful that we are still here and that neither the tangerine half-wit or the only fat person in North Korea have yet blown us all to kingdom come. In which spirit I offer you my highlights of 2017:

Opera: I have seen 15, albeit a number of them being single act works in Opera North's latest 'Little Greats' season. Among these was a 'Trial by Jury' which I can honestly say was the first Gilbert & Sullivan that I have ever enjoyed. Am I getting old? However, the best piece that I saw was a chamber version of 'The Turn of the Screw' while other highlights included a wonderful semi-staged Turandot and the first Tosca I have seen where the heroine actually throws herself off the battlements instead of doing away with herself in a manner unfaithful to the libretto, but simpler to portray on stage.

Theatre: I saw 46 plays (including Romeo and Juliet four times) which only included one real stinker (which wasn't one of the Romeo and Juliets), plus a few that I wouldn't bother to watch again (which did include one of the Romeo and Juliets). A few things stand out: 'Twelfth Night' at the Globe, Bazza's farewell, and a very explicit 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too'. I'm going to award two prizes: Best One Man Show which will be shared between 'The Autobiography of Jane Eyre' and James Hornsby's 'David Copperfield' and Best Theatrical Experience That Has Something Loosely To Do With Jane Austen which is also shared, this time between 'Mr Darcy Loses the Plot' and 'Austentatious'.

Films: I saw 15 on the big screen. Of the new ones (I'll exclude Vertigo and The Graduate from consideration) the best was 'The Handmaiden' which I highly recommend, although as I think I said at the time it's best not to watch it with your mother. Honourable mentions go to 'The Death of Stalin' (did anyone else think Jason Isaac's Zhukov was essentially an homage to Sean Bean?) and 'Baby Driver'.

Books: I am bereft. I can find no indication that there is any intention to translate the fourth book in the 'Fortunes of France' series into English, let alone the rest of them. This is a disaster. In the absence of 'Le Prince que voila' I am instead going to go for 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller.

"Throw me a frickin' bone here!" 

Gigs: I have seen 43 of these with the blues featuring very strongly. Nevertheless Tom Russell, whom I saw twice, has to be the best with honourable mentions for Wille and the Bandits, Devon Allman and Eugene 'Hideaway' Bridges.

Pancho Villa crossed the border...

Wargames: Highlight of the year was undoubtedly the trip to Kirriemuir, the biggest game that I am ever likely to play in, and the chance to roll dice with with Charles S. Grant. It was excellent, but it was a long, long way. Best game in the annexe was, I think, the ersatz Eckmuhl with Prussians standing in for Austrians in an EPIC C&C scenario. Best game at James' was Sidi Rezegh. No, just kidding, it was his Garigliano scenario, especially the four player game.

Event of the year: This is a tough one. Possibly I should just acknowledge the fact that this year I didn't get taken to A&E in an ambulance even once. It's also hard to look beyond the kick-off for the new rowing boats on the river, which was extremely funny and compelling in a 'can't take your eyes off it, car crash' sort of way; the lesson learned being that Members of Parliament shouldn't get in a rowing boat with someone four times as heavy as themselves. However, I'm going to plump for what happened in Knaresborough on May 30th, the significance of which wasn't fully understood at the time, and the details of which I am not going to reveal.

Observant readers may have noted that some of the items mentioned above are making their first appearance here. My diarist's mojo deserted me at some point in the autumn with the one beneficial result being that I have no longer had the compulsion to tell you either what I ate for breakfast (porridge with cinnamon, honey and sultanas as it happens) or every last detail of my ongoing cultural pseudery. Among the other elements of my life to be jettisoned was playing boardgames, hence the lack of reports on those recently. I had become somewhat jaded with it all, but I think a period away has restored my appetite and I expect to pick it up again in the new year. If you're really lucky I'll start writing ill-informed guff about operas again as well.

And so this is Christmas...

 "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." - Charles Dickens

Or, to be more precise, it isn't Christmas yet. It is a well known phenomenon that the onset of the Christmas season gets earlier each year. In Otley it starts with firstly the turning on of the lights which was last week - I didn't go - and then with the annual Victorian Fayre, as the Victorians almost certainly didn't spell it. I mentioned last year that I normally choose that staple of the nineteenth century working class festive fare, the samosa. However, and shockingly, there weren't any this year. I therefore opted for a potato and coriander pattie from the vegan street food stall followed by a Malaysian chicken wrap. We do things in the old fashioned way here in the West Riding. There was also once again no reindeer, but there were owls and donkeys, which had to suffice.

This year the big day was preceded by a Victorian Folk Extravaganza the night before. The performers, though thankfully not the audience, entered into the spirit of the event by dressing up. They mostly went for Thomas Hardy type costumes, appearing to have wandered in from either the set of 'Far From The Madding Crowd' or from a Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance gig according to one's perspective. The always excellent Yan Tan Tether looked like a themed version of the old 'I know my place' sketch that featured John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Yan was a mob capped indoor servant, Tan was a lady from the gentry and Tether had come as Alfred P. Doolittle. Helen McCreary, who joined the Jon Palmer Acoustic band on 'Meet On The Ledge', was dressed as if she was on her way to cheerleading practice, but she's an American, and maybe things were different over there at the time. But the main honours must go to Jon Palmer himself who gone part Dickens and part Tenniel. He sported a long tailed jacket and a truly magnificent hat. Upon spotting his headgear I reached purposefully into the man bag to fetch out the camera which, as recently advised, now accompanies me everywhere. Unfortunately the battery was flat so I had to pinch the pictures above and below from Twitter.

Musically it was very good, although I could have done with fewer seasonal songs; in fact none at all would have been fine by me. Jon Palmer was as good as ever (the new drummer must be at least fifty years older than the previous one) and I could listen to the unaccompanied singing of Yan Tan Tether for hours, especially as they once again did the Jake Thackray song after which they are not named. New to me was Bella Gaffney, whom I also very much enjoyed. She has a soulful voice for a folk singer, a versatile guitar technique (I was reminded of Catfish Keith himself; there is no finer praise), her between song banter is most entertaining and, according to others who pay more attention to these things than me, is rather easy on the eye.

Pot61pouri

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world." - Socrates 

Needless to say, I fully concur with him. Nathanial Hawthorne once wrote that "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth." Nothing demonstrates that lack of flourishing more than the stunted moral compass of Theresa May and her Little Englander acolytes.

My health continues to improve, although I still get tired very easily. Nevertheless I have managed to get out to a number of things, albeit far fewer than those that I had tickets for and didn't get to. I saw the National Theatre's broadcast of 'The Threepenny Opera', which was excellent. At the risk of repeating myself, these broadcasts really are a great resource for those of us who live in the provinces. I have also seen a touring production of 'A Tale of Two Cities', entertaining enough, but Sidney Carton's actions never get any more plausible. I find the alternative put forward by Keith Laidler in 'The Carton Chronicles' to be much more convincing. Last, but not least, I have been to see Peggy Seeger. Despite being in her eighties she is still in fine voice and is a more than effective multi-instrumentalist. She was strongest on the more personal songs, those written for her by her late brothers or by Ewan MacColl. And the young chap accompanying her did what I thought was impossible; he played a banjo - a fretless banjo in this case - in a way that I actually enjoyed.

And, for the record, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn again.

Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes

"& above all of Cintra, the most blessed spot in the habitable globe" - Robert Southey

It has been pointed out to me that going to Sintra via Estoril is a strange route to take unless one's starting position is somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. That is obviously true and I stand corrected. I suspect that what I was really doing while sneering through the train window at Estoril's lack of scale was taking a day trip from Lisbon to Cascais. I'd rather go to Sintra anyway, it's a much nicer place. Byron must have liked it - although it was one of the many words that he couldn't spell properly - and he started writing 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' while he was there.

“Everything in Sintra is divine. There is no corner that is not a poem.” -Eça de Queirós

That, by the way, is a quote from Os Maias, my favourite of his novels, and one that cries out for a BBC Andrew Davies adaptation. Eça de Queirós should rank alongside Dickens and Tolstoy and this book's main theme, explicitly stated, is one that the latter only alludes to in War and Peace; although Davies of course wasn't as reticent.

Partings Welded Together

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” - Charles Dickens

"Softly, softly"

And so to the theatre. The West Yorkshire Playhouse are once again on trend. In deciding for the second time in a couple of years to tackle a long piece of nineteenth century literature that Hollywood has fairly recently made into a film, they have chosen one in which the issue of forgiveness (or lack of it) looms large. Their version of Great Expectations is, how shall we say, pretty average. On the plus side, top marks must be given to the child actors playing the young Pip, Estella and Herbert Pocket who were all much better than one was entitled to expect. And then there was the set, which looked fantastic, a sort of rising wave of slatted wood across the stage space. However, whilst it served very well for the prison hulks - lots of hands waving symbolically through it - it didn't seem to have much relevance to the other two and a half hours and appeared to cause the actors real problems moving around on it. It rotated often and there seems to have been some intermittent malfunction causing delays to the start of each act which, when the play was originally three hours long anyway, gave rise to lots of people having to leave before the end to get their trains and buses. I moved for the second act to be nearer the door for a quick getaway and was advised that the seat I now sat in had a 'restricted view' and wasn't recommended. In fact it had an unrestricted view in that one could see the stage hands at work setting up the next scene behind the revolving scenery. Note to designer: keep it simple next time.


So, overall, don't bother. Instead watch one of the films (I enjoyed the most recent, which has Helena Bonham-Carter hamming it up as Miss Havisham) or, even better, read the book.

 “I went home, with new matters for my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.”

"To be an ideal guest, stay at home"

Wise words from E.W. Howe and I shall be following them tonight. It is the traditional time for reflection and so, for the the first time in the history of this blog, I shall indulge myself. [The Rhetorical Pedant is out of the office until January 6th and therefore has no comment to make.] Has it been a good year? Well if I ignore the no family, no home, no job stuff and overlook the bad case of shingles that I had then I can't really complain. As this blog's patron once said "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters" and, let's be frank, on this occasion Epictetus was talking out of his arse.

Anyway, on to a cultural round-up. Highlight of the year was without doubt Leonard Cohen. As I tweeted at the time (@gralhill should anyone be interested) I gave it seven stars out of five, which given that I'm a qualified accountant whose first degree was in maths is a bit embarrassing. Nonetheless it was that good. Theatre of the year was 'Tristan & Yseult' by Kneehigh at the West Yorkshire Playhouse which, I don't mind admitting, made me cry. Which considering that I'm a qualified accountant whose first degree was in maths is a bit embarrassing. [The Rhetorical Pedant's assistant is also on holiday.] Opera of the year is more difficult. As much as I enjoyed the Britten season and Opera North's continuing Ring Cycle, I am going to plump for Handel's Joshua.

Gaming wise it was a bit of a bumper year, both figure gaming and boardgaming. Wargaming wise I got to do a couple of things that I hadn't before - play with James' galleys and take part in a demo game at a show - and even from time to time felt that I had some grasp of the rules being played. My favourite was probably the Italian Wars stuff (Cerignola in fact) leading up to Triples, but it was all good. Boardgaming was always enjoyable although I would like to have played more games at the heavier end of things. Virtually everything I played was new to me and there weren't many that I wouldn't play again. I'm going to go for Love Letter as this year's game - and I know that it is anything but heavy so the Rhetorical Pedant's assistant's assistant can sit down again - because it is so minimalist and yet so good.

It only behoves me to say, once again, Gut Yontiff and to wish you all the best for 2014.

"Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which every man has some." - Charles Dickens

The Fence Collective

Disappointing. Too much Crosby and Nash and not enough Stills or Young.

A chap with a beard

Anyway, here's an old friend come to visit:

The devil's name is dullness.

What the Dickens?

And so to the theatre. I saw a sort of Dickensian spoof although the main character was the man himself, during his days as a parliamentary correspondent. It was a very funny combination of wordplay and physical comedy and featured such typical nineteenth century tropes as a one-armed man playing the guitar and an erotic, Scottish, Bollywood dancing pigeon-food seller.

A chap with a beard

I have great hopes that today's re-enactors will loosely continue the theme. The only one that I've seen so far looks, from this distance anyway, like Marie Lloyd. I suppose that as she's all alone it's possible that she's lost her way and don't know where to roam.

The Queen of the Music Hall

I shall pop down later to make sure that there is no dillying or dallying going on.

Culture

Or at least entertainment. My not-gaming has involved a bit of going out recently. I saw Martin Simpson last week as well as the new film version of Great Expectations and very good they both were.

Then on Monday I went to see June Tabor and the Oyster Band at Leeds Town Hall. What a voice she has. Having said that, both her and John Jones are among the least dynamic and agile front people that I have ever seen. James Brown and Mick Jagger do not bother to eat your hearts out. Tabor favours a sort of shuffling from side to side while slightly stooped, whereas Jones goes for a rigid-armed look reminiscent of a well wrapped up baby in a push-chair. Lovely music though.

Then last night it was off to the Grand for the National Theatre's 'One Man, Two Governors' with Rufus Hound. It was extremely funny. Northern Broadsides did their own version of Goldoni's 'One Servant, Two Masters' a few years ago with Barry Rutter in the title role which was also very good. 'The Man With Two Gaffers' was set in mid 19th century Yorkshire. The NT's version, set in Brighton in 1963, drew more on the Commedia dell'Arte influences and was positively pantomimic including audience 'volunteers' and so on. Obviously Northern Broadsides' version was still very broad though. When Rutter directed Lenny Henry in Othello he also played Brabantio. The review in the Financial Times referred to his overacting in the part. I was tempted to write in and say that if the reviewer thought that was Rutter overacting then he obviously wasn't familiar with his body of work. Still, while NB may have clog-dancing, the NT had a bloke playing the washboard.