Despite years of studying Shakespeare at school, college and Uni I'd never been to Stratford upon Avon until yesterday. It is quite picturesque, as you'd imagine, but seeing a play was the primary reason for the visit.
I went with my best friend Jen.
We first became friends 20 years ago as we were in the same A-level English class, united by the brilliant, yet formidable old spinster that was our teacher Miss Egan.
The last time we went away together was when we were 21, Jen was still at Cambridge and I was working in my first job in London earning peanuts. We went to Amsterdam on a very cheap, overnight coach and stayed in a grubby, shared room of a hostel in the red light district. We did go to a gallery, I think, but spent pretty much the whole time off our faces.
Fast forward to yesterday when we stayed in a pricey little hotel in a beautiful Cotswold's village, drank champagne and nice wine over dinner and went to see an RSC production of Richard II.
The play itself was superb. Helped by the fact the the costume was predominantly, and refreshingly, 16th-century in style and influence and the fact that it was Stratford, the production had an air of authenticity about that I've never felt before watching Shakespeare.
The director captured the pomp and ceremony of the Royal Court so beloved by King Richard from the start, dressing him in fine, light clothing which would starkly contrast with Bolingbroke's more informal and yet dark and quietly powerful appearance and persona.
Richard was played imaginatively and flawlessly by Jonathan Slinger with a slightly effeminate manner emphasising his vacilating and egocentric nature by quickly switching his tone from quiet contemplation to spitting rants and dismissive asides.
It is a play about the deposing of a King deemed by some ineffectual, misguided and weak. In history, or so I learnt yesterday, Richard was the last of England's undisputed monarchs and Bolingbroke seizing the throne was to set the country on a 200 year path of civil discontent and war. The issue of who has the right to be king is central to the theme.
There was some excellent staging with the Bolingbroke and Mowbray's duel played out on saddles mounted on frames and hung from the gods so that the actors could swing towards each other, lances in hand. Richard's post deposition soliloquy was spoken from beneath a stream of sand that was eerily lit. And his brutal stabbing made explicit by the slowly forming pool of blood from beneath his white-clothed body. The mess remained on stage through the final scene as a reminder to Bolingbroke of the price he'd had to pay for the crown.
Jen and I loved it and have vowed to make Stratford and annual event. And I'm sure Miss Egan would approve.