What a question! Is it too soon to eat a chocolate? It is still January, after all. But then who decides that chocolate eggs are only for Easter? Why not commemorate Burn’s Day (Jan 25) with a chocolate egg? Or Australia Day (Jan 26)? Or Sorry Day (same thing)? Or any day at all?
It seems a bit daft to endow a chocolate egg with such significance, that it can only be interpreted in one way. Likewise Shakespeare’s sonnets. So just as June Bloom likes to take a sonnet apart to see what makes it tick, only to discover that there’s a sparkling chandelier inside it illuminating aspects of her past life, I’m going to eat this egg and see if its smooth, sweet richness reveals – if only for a moment – something dark and mysterious about the nature of my taste-buds.
Speaking of chandeliers, if you have the opportunity to see the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Cymbeline at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and it’s on till April, do yourself a favour and take it. The critics are divided. Those who believe Shakespeare is only for highly educated, analytical minds who know how to break the text down into its rhetorical devices and poetic figures of speech hate it. They seem to believe that speaking the text clearly, illuminating it with appropriate action in an empty space amounts to ‘egging’ (or overdoing) the text. The rest of us who think his plays are for being performed in theatres by living actors for EVERYBODY to enjoy, absolutely love it.
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Some of the actors do, in my opinion, overdo their technique for speaking structured verse, with distractingly long pauses at the end of every line, but for the most part it’s clear, intelligent, direct, funny, moving, inventive, and the best production of this whacky play I’ve ever experienced.
ps. The egg was great too.
