Small Bears like "As You Like It"

 

Hello everyone!  It's wee Waverley here, smallest member of Sonning's hug, and I'm going to tell you all about a trip to the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme that Dudley and I had with Polar and Grizzly last week.

The New Vic is a "theatre in the round", so the stage is right in the middle, with seats all around it.  A company called Northern Broadsides were performing a play called "As You Like It" by Mr William Shakespeare.  Polar and Grizzly have often seen them at the New Vic and told us bears they were very good.

Once we were sure Grizzly was clear of the nasty virus, Polar said it was probably the safest time to take him out and about, as he would have the protection of both his vaccinations and from his own anti-bodies, so she bought tickets for them both.  

Then said she could probably smuggle in a bear or two, if we could hide in the big pockets of her best coat!  We thought one of the older bears would want to go, but Sonning suggested we cubs would be best as pocket bears.  

"And don't worry about following the plot or understanding Shakespeare's language," said Sonning.  "The human cubs at the school down the road do Shakespeare and have had the Royal Shakespeare Company come to teach them, even though some of them are only infants!" 

So we hid in Polar's pocket with her purse and phone until we were inside the theatre.  We sat on the seat next to Grizzly to start with, but found we had a better view of the stage if we got back into the pocket and Polar hung her coat on the safety rail in front of her.

Then the play began, and it was so exciting!  There were really colourful costumes, and fights, and people being exiled and going to live in the forest as outlaws, and comical characters, and people pretending to be sheep crawling about with slippers on their hands, but most confusing of all there was a character called Rosalind who was sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy - and sometimes a girl pretending to be a boy, pretending to be a girl!

Grizzly bought us a little tub of ice-cream in the interval, which was very tasty, so we ate some of that and got Polar to explain again who everybody was, whether they were goodies or baddies, and who was in love with who, but then in the second half some people who had been baddies became goodies after all, so we got confused again, but it was still fun.

Polar said she wasn't supposed to take photographs, but she managed a quick one with her phone before the play started again.  You can see that they have used these old hat-stands to represent the trees in the forest, and lots of costumes on washing lines to represent the canopy of the trees, as so much of the story is about disguises and dressing up.

At the end of the play nobody got killed and everyone was happy, so we small bear cubs cheered and danced about, and hugged Polar and Grizzly, and thanked them for bringing us to see the show.  

We were so sleepy after all the excitement that we fell asleep in Polar's pocket on the way home, and when we got back and tried to explain the story to the other bears, we muddled up who everyone was again and now we are all confused!