July 16th, 2006
If someone asked me what the most English place I have ever been to, I’d say Southwold. Really, it glorifies in it’s reputation of an archetypical English town: the ones you see on Midsummer Murders, the one with the bowling greens and bay-windows looking out onto overgrown hedges of hollyhocks and honeysuckle, where the crucifix outside the village church is adorned with flowers at Easter, and year-round you can smell the heady aroma of hops as you walk past the dark wood-panelled pubs selling local Adnams Ale.
It’s one of the few places I’d like not to change, there are problems, but they too are steeped in Englishness. It’s funny, the English culture by nature is elusive, because it traditionally consists of not talking about things and “making do”. The problems like the roads being unsuitable for large crowds, the shops unsuitable for Tesco-takeovers (they’re just so small), and the other little businesses: like the tiny little sweet-shop that fills a perfect niche, but can become no more. These “problems” cease to be problems when you just make do. And these little problems are what gives the town so much character. While I’m just talking about Southwold here, you could really be talking about any other “English” town in England. Listen to me go on, I don’t consider myself patriotic, but these things deserve celebrating.
It seems every time I go to Southwold’s Summer Theatre, I feel compelled to undertake a bout of Englishness (last time it happened it was when I saw Importance Of Being Earnest). This is because the cumulation of the whole zeitgeist of the town for me is to see shows at its Summer Theatre. Sometimes it seems that it caters almost unashamedly towards its target audience in the type of plays it holds, but I don’t care.
Tonight I went to see Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas. It was first performed in 1892 and made Brandon quite a profit, he traded up to a “fashionable” house in the Boltons before he died in 1914. He’s buried in Brompton Cemetery, which is also the final resting place of tenor Richard Tauber, but don’t ask me how I know that.
Charley’s Aunt is a farce set in an Oxford college, where two undergraduates: Jack Chesney (Greg Gillespie) and Charles Wickham (Charles Davies) enlist the help of their male-friend Fancourt-Babberly (Richard Emmerson) in posing as Charlie’s Aunt (the real Aunt having inconveniently changed her visiting times at the last minute) to allow them to ask two ladies to their lodgings: Amy Spettigue (Sally Oliver) and Kitty Verdun (Louise Shuttleworth), without it seeming an impropriety. It just so happens the real Aunt is a millionaire, but I won’t write about that lest I render any further confusion.
Emmerson played the dandy Fancourt-Babberly wonderfully, as he did Algernon in Importance Of Being Earnest. Though in Charley’s Aunt the acerbic comments on society Wilde does so well were conspicuously absent. However at three acts it was jolly fun and was never dull.
Now, before I fall asleep, one final piece of interest was that the Butler Brassett was played by Richard Gibson: Herr Flick in seasons 1-8 of Allo Allo!
July 17th, 2006 at 1:01 am
okay… now i need to go to Southwold because of it’s “englishness.” Darn you for teasting me with my love for travel!!!! You should know better, Alex!
July 17th, 2006 at 9:34 am
July 18th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Remember - Bernard Hill lives in Southwold and for the right price, someone will tell you where
October 8th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
[…] There was a piece September-gone on “Look East”, the BBC 1 news program for the East of England, about how Adnams stopped using the dray-horses to deliver ale to the pubs around Southwold. It’s sad, but at least the whole atmosphere of Southwold I wrote about in Charley’s Aunt still lives on. Thursday, May 8th [1975], Southwold […]