It was extremely lovely, all of it. Cycling into town and eating a picnic in St John's gardens and hanging out with my parents and Screwy in a low-key way, and playing a bit of hide-and-seek (college gardens are pretty great for that!) And it was before the start of the heatwave, so it was sunny and pleasant without being boiling hot.
The play itself was standard CSF fare. It's hard to go very wrong with The Tempest; this production did Ariel and Caliban well, impressively inhuman, and that's probably what carries the play most. There was a lot of physical comedy even by Shakespearean standards, such as Ferdinand being really hammy about how he couldn't handle the physical work Prospero sets him. Screwy's carer thought that the older actors weren't as good as the younger ones, but I rather liked Prospero. For my taste The Tempest has far too much of the pointless clown duo of Stephano and Trinculo, but the actors were pretty good at clowning being amusingly drunk without too much cringe humour. In general everybody projected well enough to be audible outdoors, and they made decent use of the space. I am not being wildly enthusiastic, but it wasn't a hugely memorable performance, it was a decently skilled cast pleasantly and unobjectionably doing Shakespeare in the way that current audiences expect by default, with stage-style period costumes and nothing too shocking. Which is basically what the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is for, so I am not at all complaining.
Sunday
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