Aesthetic Horror

TS Eliot dismissed Titus Andronicus as aesthetic horror. But 14 characters die including Tamora who dies of indigestion (!) and a clown is hanged (haven’t we all been there?) and Aaron, at the end, is buried to his neck and starves. So maybe lots of horror and no aesthetic? Which is a long lede for Kingston Lacy in Dorset. But let’s start this post sequentially.

I may be made of metal, but I don’t have sawdust for brains, bragged Rosie on the Jetsons. Sadly, the lounge robot had no defining human features, but it did have sass, and it followed me relentlessly as I navigated French signage towards the WC. There were some check-in delays for our flight, but in the end (BA Lyon to LHR) was seamless except, and I write this with extreme prejudice, we alighted at a remote stand. At BA’s home airport! In 2026! And then took a bus it seemed all the way to Luton and back before getting baggage. But in the end, we checked-in at an airport hotel, took the express into central London, had a spectacular dinner at a Georgian restaurant called DakaDaka, then walked to the Harold Pinter for the current reboot of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with Kristin Scott Thomas and Stephen Mangan.

The next morning we parted ways. Stephen headed off to Paris (such hardship) while I made my way to Dorset to see Simon.

Simon’s two-bedroom “bolt hole” in Wimborne is full of seniors as, you know, witnessed from the above pic. His friend Jones was on site and we had a pretty lively couple of days including, as per aesthetics and aesthetes, a major tip to Kingston Lacy. I will just supply three sentences of backstory: The father had sugar money back when Charles I was around and bought two estates over 16,000 acres. While there was a castle already (of course), it suffered in the Civil War so they built a new manor adjacent. One of the sons (an heir, William John) was convicted of homosexual behaviour; to escape jail he ran off to Italy. In Italy he bought, commissioned and sent back a huge amount of art and items of decor, with instructions to his sister on where to place, fit, construct. And then, of course, several generations later, it landed in the National Trust.

We had, in my opinion, a fabulous tour. Each room had National Trust volunteers. They really don’t volunteer anything unless you engage them. But once you do the knowledge they have, the interest in the history of the place, it’s both appreciated and sort of amusing. Plus, given the volume of art and the value, the shutters are down during the day; if you talk to a volunteer they use a flashlight to indicate, oh I don’t know, a Titian here, a Velasquez there.

Many of the doors and door frames were carved in Venice then shipped back to England. But all the doors were open between the rooms and the carvings were hidden. If you didn’t engage the volunteers to move the doors and show you, you’d have no idea how intricate and detailed the whole place is.

Anyway, Dorset was amazing. Seeing Simon and Michael, Wimborne, Kingston Lacy, some good eats and better drinking. All told wonderful. Headed back in the sunshine to London, spent one night in a hotel, and went to the current National production of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. I saw the original New York production (1981, directed with exceptional grace by Tommy Tune), so have waited a few decades for a reboot. Unfortunately no pics of the first act set, which was a literal jungle in Africa, and beyond stunning.