Then enter Vladimir and Estragon
Then, enter Vladimir and Estragon.Estragon: Was this the place where Godot said to meet?Vladimir: My boots are heavy.Help me take them off.A touch of surrealism! Excellent, for essays on drama conventions. But you grasp the idea by now, so if your school is interested, you only have to get in touch with me to see the whole of the five acts. Make your cheques payable to Kington/ Shakespeare International But hurry, hurry!
More from Miles Kington. There’s an intriguing display on the top floor of Kew Palace, just re-opened to the public after a £6.6m restoration project. It simultaneously chastises the visitor’s urge to touch and indulges it – reminding you to keep your hands off the fabric of the building but offering three small swatches of paintwork and flock wallpaper on which you can exercise (and possibly exorcise) the tactile impulse.
These have been connected to electronic counters so that visitors will have a statistical measure of the speed at which human contact erodes a pristine finish. At about 140 touches, which was the figure the counter had reached when I visited earlier this week, you could already see the first faint signs of distress. The pink of the paintwork was smudged with grey, the pile of the wallpaper visibly thinning. What life there is in distress, though – and how lifeless perfection can be. The restoration of Kew Palace, an on-and-off home to George III and his family, has been beautifully done, and it’s well worth a visit. But, like any grand project of historical reconstruction, it struggles with the deadening effect of fresh paint. Never mind that the paint exactly reconstitutes that scraped from buried layers of decoration.
Never mind, too, that the Royal Family might have expected their apartments to be finished to the highest standard. What the unmarked surfaces of Kew Palace tell you is that the occupants are long gone – that no one lives here any more.
The curators of the palace know that perfectly well, of course – and they’ve taken several steps to counteract the inert gas that seeps into all display houses (historic or commercial) and can so easily suffocate them. As you tour the rooms, for instance, you’re accompanied by a “radio play”, which – notionally at least – brings to life the former inhabitants, complete with Queen Charlotte’s Germanic accent and George’s characteristic “What! What!”.In practice, though, this simply adds another layer of perfect finish. What’s most obvious is the clarity of the diction and the skill of the sound balance, with its tweeting birds and crunching carriage wheels.