1995: Twelfth Night

The summer of 1995, like the one which was to follow, was a scorcher.  It saw Oliver Clauson's in-period production of Twelfth Night , again with an original musical score - this time by James Harpham - and featured a lesson learned by Orsino the hard way.  In striving for realism, Orsino had augmented the artificial fruit (with which he customarily toyed whilst requesting music if it were "the food of love") with a bunch of real grapes - a fact which had not passed unnoticed by a local colony of wasps.  The resultant raid called for a significant exercise in self-control in the face of eight wasp stings before the completion of the first speech in the play.  Mercifully, the audience did not appear to realise the predicament of the sad, but now manifestly wiser, Duke.

When, the next week, the entire production decamped to stables at Sandringham Park for a further four days in front of a Norfolk audience, Orsino did not repeat the experiment in authenticity!