Review

I was invited to attend the press preview, held two weeks before the opening date, and found myself not in two but in numerous minds. There is no doubting the enthusiasm of all the volunteers, from the cast who threw themselves whole-heartedly into what they had to do to the very cheerful and helpful men and women who guided us down the long path from the reception area to the grandstand (named the Tribune incidentally) and then back to the car park.

And there is no doubt that Kynren is visually spectacular: a Norman longship emerges from the lake, as, later, does a castle; Roman infantry, cavalry and even a chariot parade before us; surrounded by mist Joseph of Arimathea plants his staff at Glastonbury; there's Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; monks carry St Cuthbert’s body over the Holy Island causeway, up to their knees in the lake; Britons win at the Battle of Stamford Bridge but lose at Hastings; knights in armour joust and tilt at the quintain; the Scots invade and are repulsed; peasants look after their stock and live their lives; Henry VIII and Francis I meet on the Field of the Cloth of Gold; Queen Elizabeth I sails up the Thames; Locomotion 1 carries her passengers the length of the stage; the British Empire celebrates Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; there are excerpts from Shakespeare; factories sprout and miners go underground.

And, throughout, merry peasant women dance, although by the time we get to the '20s they’re doing the Charleston.

The costumes and props are terrific. Clearly no expense or skill has been spared in creating them and, of course, as darkness falls there are lighting effects, video projections and fireworks.

Visually, the show cannot be faulted but, spectacular though the scenes are, by their very nature they are slow-moving. The publicity likens watching the show to going to the cinema—it is, we are told, movie-like and action-packed—but the movies can cross-fade or cut from scene to scene: when you have scores of people on a 7.5 acre stage, it takes time to clear them so there are long pauses between scenes, as one ends and another begins and different casts move off and on.

And trying to cram 2,000 years of history into 90 minutes, needing to concentrate on the visual and having to make allowances for the time used between scenes mean that it’s all pretty superficial: Henry VIII meets Francis I but no mention of his marriages, the split from Rome or the dissolution of the monasteries, all of which were arguably rather more important in the history of England than a ceremonial occasion, no matter how splendid.

And there are a few oddities. It’s fine to give us the Joseph of Arimathea myth, but why invent a meeting between Elizabeth I and Shakespeare at Auckland Castle? Or say that she commanded him to parade his greatest characters by the Thames? And why suggest that the famous Boxing Day 1914 game of football was planned in advance?

But these oddities are minor; what isn’t is the poor quality of the writing. I winced when, at the end of a WWI sequence, a voice rang out “The war’s over! Let’s all go to the Durham Miners’ Gala!” And I can’t believe that in the heart of what was the Durham Coalfield no one told them how Durham people pronounce “gala.” (For those who don’t know, it’s “gayla”. My father, a pitman for most of his life, must have turned in his grave!)

There is a link running throughout: a young boy, called Arthur (what else!), accidentally kicks a football through a window of a house in the grounds of Auckland Castle—it must be the '50s because he's pretending to be Stanley Matthews—bringing the Bishop himself out to speak to him and he decides to give the young lad a history lesson. By the end, in the modern day, Arthur is in his seventies and (oh cliché!) he's using a walking-stick.

As I said, my reactions are various: as a spectacle it’s excellent; as a survey, no matter how quick, of English history it’s superficial; as a piece of theatre it needs a good writer. And whether it will succeed in attracting tourists and aid in the regeneration of the region, only time will tell.