CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: Theatre back in the Bard old days

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Strumpets, knaves and disaster – theatre back in the Bard old days

Walking Tudor England 

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Write Around The World With Richard E Grant

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A trip to the theatre feels like a reckless and dangerous business these days.

For my wife’s birthday, we dared a West End show last month. I was afraid to clear my throat, in case it was mistaken for a cough and panic swept the stalls. 

But as Professor Suzannah Lipscomb discovered in Walking Tudor England (5 Select), in Shakespeare’s time an evening of drama really could turn into a crisis.

At The Globe theatre on the South Bank, a pregnant woman and her daughter on the front row were killed when a special effect blew up.

As Professor Suzannah Lipscomb (above with Tudor dancers at Michelham Priory) discovered in Walking Tudor England, in Shakespeare’s time an evening of drama could turn into a crisis

And the actors halted a performance after a gang of toughs barged past the ticket booth without paying. In the brawl that followed, one freeloader was stabbed to death.

Complete disaster struck during the Bard’s Henry VIII, when a live cannon was fired. The red-hot ball struck the thatch and set it alight, and the theatre burned down.

This series is crammed with juicy anecdotes, rattled off with relish. There’s no time wasted on waffle: the Prof marches up with her knapsack on her shoulders, paints a vivid picture of the era with a few well-chosen tales, and strides off to her next destination.

It’s history on foot for super fit tourists. Stragglers are advised to stick to the open-top bus.

Suzannah started at Greenwich Palace, where Henry VIII had his fateful fall during a jousting match in 1536. She looked in at the Dutch church in Austin Friars, then took a brisk stroll up Turnmill Street in Farringdon — once ‘the most disreputable street in London’.

Then she drew breath at Bridewell hospital, a prison workhouse for Tudor petty criminals, ‘arrant bawds and strumpets’, and ‘idle loitering knaves’.

With a suitcase full of paperbacks, Richard E Grant (pictured) was reading his way from Naples to the heel of Italy, on the first part of his literary travelogue, Write Around The World

The language has changed but, human nature being what it is, the country is still full of arrant bawds and idle knaves.

She picked a cold day for this highly entertaining walk, and the Prof was bundled up in quilted jacket and scarf — which sometimes meant her commentary sounded slightly muffled.

No such problems for actor Richard E. Grant, who was clad only in green trunks and sunhat for a dip off the Amalfi Coast. 

He lay in the water, watched from above by a drone camera, with his arms and legs splayed like a starfish.

With a suitcase full of paperbacks, Richard was reading his way from Naples to the heel of Italy, on the first part of his literary travelogue, Write Around The World (BBC4).

At each place, he dipped into a classic set in an Italian town —starting in the oppressive suburbs in the shadow of Vesuvius.

That’s the backdrop for a quartet of novels, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, by the mysterious Elena Ferrante — a pseudonym masking a writer so secretive Grant claims no one knows whether the author is male or female. 

The story charts an obsessive, destructive friendship between two girls whose community is blighted by crime.

Richard’s final stop was in Matera where 20,000 people lived in caves until a few decades ago, was spectacular. This was a splendid concept for a travel show, and the locations did it justice

Seek out, if you can, the TV adaptation. Though its young stars had never acted before, they are mesmerisingly good.

It’s a pity Richard didn’t explore Ferrante’s Naples in more depth. He got sidetracked instead by Dickens’s descriptions of the city, before a brief excursion to Pompeii that told us nothing at all.

But he was on better ground in Positano, staying in the very hotel room where Patricia Highsmith first got the idea for her charming serial killer, Tom Ripley.

And his final stop, in Matera where 20,000 people lived in caves until a few decades ago, was spectacular.

This was a splendid concept for a travel show, and the locations did it justice.

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