We went to Colchester Castle on Saturday to see a play based around Constable’s painting ‘The Hay Wain’, which is 200 years old this year. The play imagined the lives of the farmworkers who would have been depicted in Constable’s painting as the people sitting on the wain, and as little white dots in the fields in the distance.
The play was delayed for fifteen minutes, so that the festival playing Oasis hits a hundred yards away could roll to a stop and let the actors be heard. I kid you not, I have found that the festival was organised by the Colchester Anti-Loo Roll Brigade. Look them up, they’re Good People – a group of volunteers working to help anyone in and around Colchester impacted by the shortages caused by panic-buying in the first weeks of the first lock-down.
We were all sitting in the open air, facing the floodlit castle, as the actors played out the possible lives those farm-workers led in 1821 – just recovered from the impact of the Napoleonic Wars and the Enclosure Act, and being encouraged to revolt against the new regime of being paid a wage rather than working their own field-strip. The audience was equally entertaining; the family near us had a camp chair collapse under the teenage son, and he spent the perfomance sprawled on the grass behind his elder relatives cracking cans of drink and peering between their legs at the action.
The night was warm, the actors put their backs into it and we had a good time. It is just great to be back in the theatre, whether that’s in a marquee, on camp chairs in the open air or (o luxury) in a brick-built theatre. If you get the chance to see The Hay Wain in Castle Park, Colchester, take it. Even if it rains, it’s a good play.
Julia Chalkley 