#18 – Outdoor Theatre

Shakespearean theatre, picnic in the park and unpredictable weather – all truly British things. Put them together and you get Theatre in the park.  I’ve done Shakespeare in the park before and it rained so much that I still felt the chill for days afterwards so I was hoping for better this time, especially since we’ve had some a gorgeous summer.

 
We got to Jubilee Park at Canary Wharf just in time to bag ourselves a decent blanket spot and broke out the picnic.  And then sat and watched as the grass around us filled up until barely a blade was visible.  I already knew the story but had never seen it quite like this.  They had modernised the story and thrown in a good number of fun songs too so we enjoyed singing along.

The play was Twelfth Night and so it opens with claps of thunder and the sound of rain which obviously gave the weather bad ideas and as the interval approached there were little drops falling.  As they started up again our view was through umbrellas.  And gradually the park area became a whole lot less crowded than it had been.  But we stuck it out even though we only had a small umbrella between the three of us and by the end it had actually stopped raining. 

 



Even though it was cold and we were wet it was so much fun and I enjoyed seeing a very different take on Twelfth Night.  I’m still a fan of the Outdoor Theatre.