Our revels now
are ended. The Bronygarth Summer Party is over for another year, the yurts back
in the garage and the lawn at Brookside cleared. There are only 150 people in
the whole village, yet almost thirty helped prepare for the party in one way or
another. It’s the most important social gathering of the year and an
affirmation of our sense of community. It’s also a chance to drink too much,
talk nonsense and dance in strange ways. Some of us make fuller use of this
opportunity than others.
There are many
lines from The Tempest that might
seem appropriate to the situation, not least Trinculo’s observation, ‘there’s
but five upon this isle; we are three of them; if th’other two be brained like
us, the state totters.’
Shakespeare’s
drunkards are always great comic value and The
Tempest contains some of his funniest comedy. It is arguably his most
perfect play and certainly the last he wrote unassisted. It’s almost impossible not to see it as a
valediction. When Prospero abjures his ‘rough magic’, breaks his staff and
buries his book fathoms deep, most interpret this as Shakespeare’s renunciation
of his art before retiring to Stratford.
It’s equally
hard not to see Prospero’s speech after he’s interrupted the masque as
expressing the dramatist’s sense of mortality, when ‘every third thought shall
be my grave.’ It is imbued with a sense of life’s frailty and transience as
well as its magic and beauty,
Our revels now
are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold
you, were all spirits, and
Are melted
into air, into thin air;
And like the
baseless fabric of this vision,
The
cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn
temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which
it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this
insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a
rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are
made on, and our little life
Is rounded
with a sleep.
Prospero’s words
are all encompassing, from our ‘little’ lives to the ‘great globe itself’, his
vision cosmic. For while the ‘cloud-capped towers’ and ‘gorgeous palaces’ were
the product of his artifice, they equally stand for real buildings that will one
day crumble and fall – in the same way that the ‘great globe’ is both his
theatre, The Globe, and our planet, which will also pass away. All that is
solid will one day cease to be, as unenduring as ‘this insubstantial pageant’.
I think of Prospero’s
speech every time the yurts come down. It might seem quite a leap from
Shakespeare’s meditation on art and life to the ending of a village summer get
together, but every party is kind of performance. For one thing, people dress
up. Not flamboyantly, in most cases, but with a modest effort. And there is a
willing suspension of disbelief about what bankers, politicians and media
tycoons are doing to the world. They are completely forgotten. Instead, food is
shared, jokes told and beer and wine consumed while the band plays and children
run in the garden or throw themselves about the bouncy castles.
The yurts
themselves provide a theatrical space, reminiscent of a circus big top. They
were made eight years ago as a community project with brightly coloured covers stitched
by a local hot air balloon factory. They are not ‘cloud-capped’, ‘gorgeous’ or
‘solemn’ but they are beautiful spaces that provide dancehall, food-tent and
chill-out room, all hung with lights and decorated with flowers.
The yurts are
made from steam-bent ash. Circular in shape, the walls are formed by a trellis
that supports roof ribs radiating from a central wheel. Evolved by Central
Asian nomads, the components are light and compact for the substantial covered area
they create. Wishing to thank the nomadic peoples that originated these elegant
and economic structures, I invited the Mongolian ambassador to our inaugural party.
To everyone’s astonishment, perhaps even his own, he accepted. He arrived in a
long black Mercedes accompanied by two minders and seemed reluctant to leave
several hours later. When finally he did, everyone at the party lined the drive
and applauded as his car scrunched over the gravel and disappeared into the
darkness.
That party was
deemed to be the best ever, but as we always decide that the latest party is
better than any previous, not surprising. This year we were joined by
the Bishop of Tanzania, who was staying with friends nearby. He was gracious
enough to say a prayer in Swahili and we presented him with £100 as a
contribution to the school his church supports in Africa.
We also
remembered John Bampfield, first Chairman of the Bronygarth Social Committee,
who died last winter. John was formidable. A retired Major who had taught at
Sandhurst, he was a member of the MCC and golf-playing Daily Telegraph reader.
From the outside he might have seemed a cartoon reactionary, but he had huge
personality, enormous energy, multiple enthusiasms and worked tirelessly for
the community. He also faced infirmity in his last years with invariable
stoicism and good humour.
With his wife,
Sheila, it was John who bullied us into having our first ever summer party in
2000, to celebrate the millennium. Wishing to commemorate his incredible contribution
to Bronygarth, it was decided to designate the beer yurt as ‘The Bampfield
Arms’ so a sign was painted bearing his family coat of arms. This will
henceforth stand between two barrels of beer at all our gatherings.
John was a
great character. Use of the word suggests the extent to which we are all
players. Shakespeare consistently relates our passage of life to parts played
by an actor – from Jacque’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech to Macbeth’s ‘walking
shadow’ that ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage’ and Lear’s declamation
that ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools.’
The tragedies
necessarily portray life as bleak. Prospero’s vision is benign. ‘We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on’
while ‘our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.’
His words are
gentle. Life is ‘little’ suggesting something harmless, almost child-like,
while ‘rounded’ implies its ends are smooth and pleasingly shaped - and there
is nothing here fearful in sleep (though his Jacobean audience might have been
surprised by an absence of Christian afterlife).
The Tempest is ultimately a play about
forgiveness and compassion. Despite his brother’s treachery and the drunken
stupidity of Trinculo and Stephano, Prospero views humanity as ‘such stuff/As
dreams are made on.’ The conjunction of ‘stuff’ and ‘dreams’ is typical of
Shakespeare. The former connotes something nondescript, perhaps cheap, while
the latter speaks of our capacity for poetry and magic; humans have a
simultaneous capacity for ordinariness and transcendence.
Also typical
of Shakespeare is the rich ambiguity of Prospero’s lines. It is not made clear
whether dreams are the stuff of which we are made or whether the stuff that we
are inspires dreams in others. We are both.
If it’s true
that the partygoers were like actors, then it has to be admitted that we didn’t
melt ‘into air, into thin air’. Instead, we drifted off by twos and threes.
When I left with a couple of friends after midnight, the dance floor had been
taken over by a group of teenagers, all male. They were mostly arms and legs
fuelled by alcohol and testosterone, but keeping the party alive.
Lit from
inside, the yurts glow like Chinese lanterns. Looking back, we could see
figures flitting about the lawn, then after a bend in the road all was gone and
we were walking down a hedged lane with a vast sky above, part clouded and
dotted with stars.
The next
afternoon we returned. Within two hours all the rubbish had been sorted into
bins and bags and the yurts taken down. It’s not quite true that we left ‘not a
rack behind’ as there was a battered wheelbarrow on the edge of the lawn filled
with the squares of wood on which the drummer had set up his kit. Otherwise,
things were concluded, our revels truly over.
Thanks to Jonathan Abbatt for photo
