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July 15, 2020 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Our covid 19 policy

Covid 19 policy

Moss Cottage

Our Covid 19 policy

Thank you for taking the time to read actions we are undertaking to keep you safe during your stay with us during this difficult time.

We have undertaken a full risk assessment in line with government guidelines which results in the following actions.

*All high touch areas to be sanitised on a regular basis

*All bedding is cleaned in house with the appropriate biological cleaning agents to ensure we have complete control over its condition.

*Rooms will sanitised with antibacterial and antiviral cleaners.

*We can only allow 4 guests to breakfast at one time, unless all three rooms are from the same party. Due to this we may have to ask you to agree a breakfast time. We will still be serving our delicious full breakfast and homemade preserves (yummy!)

*Hand sanitiser will be available in all rooms as well as the breakfast room.

*We have unfortunately had to remove our leaflet rack, but we will still have some leaflets and single use maps available for you.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

December 21, 2018 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Timon of Athens, review by Peter Buckroyd

I have to admit that I’m a Kathryn Hunter groupie. Some of most exciting theatrical experiences I have had have involved her – as director of an incredible Pericles at the Globe and as actor in Kafka’s Monkey at the Young Vic, in The Skriker at the National, as the best Fool I have ever seen at the RSC and as a Cleopatra which had me on the edge of my seat and open mouthed with amazement and admiration at the RSC. So I have been excited since the present season was announced that she is playing Timon.
But her highly individual physical and vocal delivery is not to everyone’s taste. And at the preview which we attended people further back said they couldn’t hear everything. That wasn’t my experience because I had made sure I was in the front row so that I could see at close quarters her incredible use of hands and arms. She is an actor (like the incomparable Oliver Ford-Davies and Ian McKellen) who excites me as soon as she appears on stage and opens her mouth.
One of the things about this performance is that she gives nothing at all away about what she is feeling and why in the first half. Her Timon is engaged with philanthropy and generosity but not at all with the people she invites to her lavish banquets. She smiles, greets and embraces but without any real personal connection. Her guests recognise people and types we can recognise but she doesn’t. She is on a different planet altogether. And so it makes sense that she can be as intense in her rejection of the world as she was in displaying her generosity. She was never part of the world as evinced by her ignoring her Steward’s warnings.
I wasn’t convinced in the first half that the acting was as good as it might have been but then I realised that director Simon Godwin was turning things on their head by suggesting that the servants were real and the Athenians shallow caricatures. Flavius the Steward (Patrick Drury), the Welsh Apemantus (Nia Gwynne), Lucilius (Salman Akhtar) and Servilius (Riad Richie), all dressed in black, were not part of the corrupt world. Only they seemed ‘real’ in modern terms. It was striking in the opening banquet scene Alcibiades (splendidly played by Debbie Korley) looked different from all the others. And it was masterstroke by Godwin that these Corbinites, genuine in their desire for a revolution from all the self-seeking, utterly selfish Tories, should turn out to be the ones in Alcibiades’s victorious army.
I’ve never thought that Aristotle had much to do with Shakespearian tragedy and yet I ended up thinking at the end of this production that it was as Aristotelian as Shakespeare gets: greatness meeting with a fall, realisation and purgation for the audience, all the greater for not witnessing Timon’s death on stage.
This production is pretty amazing to look at. Just about everything in the early part of the play is gold – the backdrop, the carpet, the statue, the table settings, the gifts Timon bestows, the chairs and chandelier and the wonderful OTT costumes designed as is the set by Soutra Gilmour. Then it turns to black and white so that gold, black, white and dirt all become powerfully and resonantly symbolic, especially when Timon digs up the chest of gold from the dirt.
There are lots of splendid moments – the freezes at the banquet, the intertwined missions to get contributions for Timon’s impoverishment, Alcibiades’s protest march, the barefootedness of Timon’s second satirical feast, the picnic Apemantus brings to the hermitised Timon, the unforgettable
moment then Flavius shares his little reining gold with the other servants.
Two things I don’t understand. This is just about the only Shakespearian tragedy when there is no mention of the protagonist’s family. Why was Timon wearing a wedding ring then? I fear this was an error. The other thing is that it has become a fashion in plays not directed by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman for actors to lose their consonants this means that they become hard to hear. It is an issue for the RSC voice coaches (such as Kate Godfrey in this case) to address with some urgency.
I think this is a play worth seeing – as is Tartuffe. Come and make a special treat of it with a night or two at Moss Cottage with its newly refurbished bathrooms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: review, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare

May 19, 2018 by billbruce

Romeo & Juliet. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

Romeo and Juliet
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
We nearly always go to the previews of the plays at the RSC and we have yet to go to one directed
either by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman which isn’t completely ready for public performance.
I enjoyed this brilliantly paced production, splendidly directed by Erica Whyman, for many reasons. It
was great to see characters who are the age Shakespeare intended. You can believe that Juliet (Karen
Fishwick), talking ten to the dozen, is fourteen and her mother (Mariam Haque) twenty eight. Romeo
(Bally Gill) is also a convincing teenager with streetwise swagger, rapid changes of emotion,
impetuosity and body in perpetual motion. It is also refreshing to see a modern production which is
contemporary. It is dominated by gangland culture where the races and genders are mixed and knife
crime is rife. I think it’s most inventive of Whyman to present iambic pentameter and rhyming
couplets as characteristic of rap-like street culture; the form of language itself becomes myth. And
Romeo’s purchase from the apothecary makes clear that drug dealing is in contemporary cities a
response to poverty and threatened destitution.
You can see that although Shakespeare calls the feud an ‘ancient quarrel’ it is passed down from
generation to generation. Tybalt’s irrational belligerence is mirrored by Capulet in his vile and
abusive treatment of Juliet. In that scene you can easily imagine Lord Capulet in a street gang fifteen
or twenty years previously. The verse is well delivered throughout but the language and rhythms are
from the street. Splendid. There is impressive attention to detail, too. Don’t miss (as most of the
audience did when I saw it) the dumb show with Romeo and Juliet in bed together during the interval.
I had not noticed before how Lord Capulet talks about Juliet in the third person even while she is
present. The most highly political and social statement comes at the end of the play where the dead
walk among the living and where there is little understanding of how to change the world except by
splitting and violence – timely for me in week where the irrational President Trump took on Iran,
alienated Europe and was busy cosying up to North Korea.
Tom Piper’s set is simple. No need for the RSC to spend loads of money just for the sake of it when
the play is what we have gone to see. There’s a big cube with an open face which can be turned roun
as which deals with all the location changes prompting the thought that no matter who is involved and
wherever it is taking place the same things recur. There’s a small ladder, some ladders on the outside
of the cube and an armchair which is carried on and off. It’s all the more effective, therefore, when
after Tybalt’s death red candles, red roses and a red shroud are brought on. The complete lack of
unnecessary frills is demonstrated when the dead Tybalt is placed on the shroud which is then pulled
easily off stage – far more effective than trying to heave a sizeable Tybalt (Raphale Sowole) off by
muscle power. The music composed by Sophie Cotton, too, is contemporary and effective in creating
moods. The rock music at Capulet’s feast, with its undertones of energy and anarchy, creates
wonderful prolepsis and dramatic irony.
There are some subtleties of characterisation, too, all of which make sense of some of the problems in
the play. Rather than gloss over it, Whyman deals with the behaviour of Lady Capulet. She is faced
with a dilemma: she loves her daughter but is scared of her husband. She knows that he will react
violently towards Juliet when she refuses to marry Paris; that is why she leaves Juliet to him. It is for
her own survival that she sides with her husband. Paris is gentle, loyal and charming, genuinely
distressed at Juliet’s death. That is why he visits the monument at the end. Friar Lawrence (Andrew
French) is also interestingly characterised. In a different way from the street gang members he, too,
acts on the spur of the moment. All his decisions are made because he has just thought of them. This
is a clever choice because he’s just like Romeo, really. And one of the real problems of the text is
what to do with Mercutio and how. As a female gang member this Mercutio, played with
extraordinary physicality and energy by Charlotte Josephine, tries to outmale the gang’s males but
suffers in the end for it .The Duke, too, is female, striding on stage in her sharp suit and shoes and
making pronnouncements which sound authoritative but do little to solve society’s problems. We
cannot avoid thinking of our present Prime Minister. In this way Whyman invites us to think about all
the females in the play and their places in their society. And if we do that she has forced us to reflect
on contemporary Britain.
We are also invited to think about class, ethnicity and background. It becomes clear that some
members of the lower classes such as Balthasar (Tom Padley) have unfailing loyalty to their masters
in refusing to leave the monument even when instructed to do so, unlike Friar Lawrence who flees in
fright in order to save his own skin. Whyman gives the one illiterate character in the play a West
Indian accent. Lady Capulet and Juliet have Scottish accents. Benvolio a northern one. The Nurse
(splendidly played by Ishia Bennison), having escaped from her position merely as a wet nurse, has to
side with her masters in telling Juliet to marry Paris because she needs to keep her job. The black
characters, like the white, have a range of accents.
I feel I haven’t done justice to the depth and sophistication of the problemisation and interrogation of
the text which Whyman has undertaken. It is a play about extremism and impetuosity. It is a study in
false logic. It is truly contemporary with much to say about a multi-ethnic society. I have seen it
twice already and I am looking forward to seeing it again.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: reviews, Romeo & Juliet, rsc review, shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon theatre, William Shakespeare

May 9, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Antony & Cloepatra. Review by Dr. Peter Buckroyd

Antony and Cleopatra

There are plenty of problems with this play for a director and it’s always a surprise to me when the actress playing Cleopatra makes it work. When we hear Enobarbus describe Cleopatra we usually take it as romanticised hyperbole by someone who has been bewitched by her, possibly besotted. Not so here. Enobarbus describes exactly what we have seen. Cleopatra is a creature of ‘infinite variety’. We never quite know what she is going to do or how she is going to behave next. And age has certainly not withered her in any way: she is elegant, charismatic, slim, sexy, dangerous alluring and changeable.
I have to admit that I didn’t really want to see another production of this play. Despite its mixed critical opinions I was smitten by Kathryn Hunter’s amazing physical and vocal performance as Cleopatra in the RSC’s last production. But Josette Simon is equally alluring, though in very different ways. You can see why Antony is so besotted with a middle aged woman who looks thirty. And who wouldn’t be?
Director Iqbal Khan gives us a Cleopatra focussed production with some psychological depth. The extraordinary intelligence and imagination he showed in Much Ado About Nothing is abundantly evident here too. Cleopatra doesn’t just put her robe on at the end; she strips herself bare of earthly trappings before she does so and prepares for the afterlife sans power, sans wig, sans clothes, sans everything mortal as she makes an existential breakthrough from the physical world to mythical timelessness. And the asp, unseen inside her costume as she dies, is a projection of her own physical and spiritual reality rather than an external agent of mortality. And we are never allowed to forget that Cleopatra is an outsider in Egypt; she may command it but she is not of it.
But it is not just the brilliance of Josette Simon’s performance which makes this a must-see production. From the very beginning we are presented with an exciting and vibrant dance, but one which foreshadows a dance of death. And Cleopatra’s ‘fearful sails’ are another dance of death, beautiful to look at but shrouded in empyrean dry ice, paper/cardboard ships which are inscrutable projections whose movements are unpredictable and unfathomable. The sea battle ends with a metaphorical burning ship in the storm and clouds, betokening the crumbling of empires.
Although the story is very clearly told, by downplaying the changes in political allegiance in the play the director highlights an important and contemporary message. When things are rough at home fight foreign wars. Caesar does it; Thatcher did. Mexico, North Korea and Gibraltar are lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. There is no doubt that in political terms Caesar plays his cards right, but this production suggests that Shakespeare filtered through Iqubal Khan is interested in what happens to everyone else.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design for the production is sumptuous. Following the gorgeous dance opening a bed arises from the trap and we are presented with Egyptian luxury in costumes and cushions, an appropriate theatrical location for Cleopatra’s self-indulgence. There is some fine male flesh and a steam bath in Rome. The architectural background is at a sharp angle in in Egypt but straightens up for Rome, although we slowly notice that it is only almost straight on; there is a suggestion of a skewed society despite its apparent brazenness.
Lepidus (Patrick Drury), Antony (Antony Byrne) and Caesar (Ben Allen) are clearly delineated: the peacemaker, the passionate and the narcisissistic pragmatist. The characters become part of the architectural plan of the play and by the middle we become aware of the parallels between Cleopatra’s narcissism and Caesar’s. His eating grapes as he meets Cleopatra is a wonderful detail, conjuring up ideas about appetite, sensuality and the beast that devours. There are beautiful groups and pictures throughout. The freeze on Pompey’s ship is marvellous.
This production is not to be missed. Neither is Julius Caesar with largely the same extremely strong cast. Come and make your visit even more enjoyable with a stay at Moss Cottage.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: Antony & Cleopatra review, rsc, rsc review, Rsc reviews, Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare

November 14, 2016 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Orchestra of The Swan, Review.

Orchestra of the Swan
Stratford ArtsHouse
8 November

In the past when Orchestra of the Swan has featured a newly commissioned work the audience has stayed away in droves. Not so in this 21st Anniversary year, mainly because of the imaginative way in which the new work has been introduced. At each of the concerts a newly commissioned work will be paired with a familiar classic, on this occasion Douglas J Cuomo’s Objects in Mirror with JS Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no2 in F major which formed Cuomo’s inspiration for his new work. David Curtis made this new work accessible for the audience by having the orchestra play very short extracts of the Bach followed by short extracts of the Cuomo in order to show how Cuomo used some of Bach’s ideas and motifs, thereby helping the audience to find ways of listening to and accessing this new work. Brilliant. Particularly as the last two works on the programme were Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no3 in G major followed by Stravinsky’s Concert for E flat for chamber Orchestra ‘Dumbarton Oaks’, a tribute to Bach’s work.
The programme began with Steve Martland’s arrangement of JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, an extraordinary arrangement which captured some of the ways in which Bach prefigures dynamic shifts and emphatic moments of contemporary rock music.
The harpsicord is barely audible in most Baroque music but Cuomo gives it real character and moments to itself so that for a change we could admire David Ponsford’s skilled playing and interactions with other instruments. I loved the intense and passionate second movement, the Ballad, where Cuomo showed he was not frightened to create slow delicacy, epitomised by Hugh Davies’s lovely playing of the muted trumpet.
Bach’s decision to have three violins rather than the customary division between first and second violins in Brandenberg 3 gave the audience quite a different string ensemble sound with just the four string lines rather than the customary five. And who said that minimalism was a twentieth century phenomenon? The two chord second movement must have been as startling to eighteenth century audiences as it was to us on Tuesday.
What a wonderful concert it was. I can’t wait for the next one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Bach, Brandenberg concerto, Classical music, Classical music Stratford upon Avon. David Curtis, Orchestra of the Swan, review

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Moss Cottage Bed & Breakfast
61 Evesham Road
Stratford upon Avon
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CV37 9BA

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Reviews from the RSC

Rsc review. The Whip.

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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