Wednesday 12 November 2014

Afternoon Tea at Eastwell Manor

One darkening autumnal afternoon, that was flush with the fresh bite you get in country air, the ladies and I decided to escape from the realities of life for a bit with a visit to Eastwell Manor for a spot of afternoon tea.
Eastwell Manor will always hold a special place in my heart; it’s where Steve and I got married.  Returning to it always feels a little like coming home – in fact (unabashed bragging here) my family does have ancestral ties to the Manor, a fact we discovered only after we had booked the place for the wedding.  Unfortunately they aren’t strong enough to boot the current owners out and take up a permanent residency.
Eastwell really is the quintessential country park and estate, originally built over the course of 10 years between 1540 and 1550 as a private residence for Sir Thomas Moyle.  Nowadays the Manor serves as a country house hotel, complete with golf and fishing facilities and the land also operates as a working farm.  
To me, it is just beautiful.  Situated in the village of Boughton Lees, between Canterbury and Ashford, you enter through the great gates and drive up the sweeping track, past the fields of sheep until you reach the Manor proper.  There, you pull in across crunching gravel and cross the courtyard lit by the yellow gleam of the Manor’s windows.  As you are walking, the scent of wood smoke hits you immediately from the great fire in the entrance hall.  It feels like you are stepping back in time. 
Upon entering, we were led into the bar area where our table had been set up in the bay window.  This bar has some seriously impressive spirits and liquors behind it.  When my grandfather offered to buy Steve a drink on our wedding day, he was very, very tempted to opt for the Napoleonic brandy that was encased in a locked, glass cabinet.  It's lucky he didn't - I think it was about £500 a measure!  We weren't interested in the bar though, and instead sank into deep sofa’s, glanced at the menu options, and all four of us ordered the Champagne Tea at a very reasonable £29 a head.  Champagne for myself, Kir Royale for Claire and Ellie and a Bellini for Jo.  
The afternoon tea at Eastwell is seasonal, with the flavours and ingredients being selected to complement the time of the year.  We were treated to sandwiches filled with roast beef and rocket, crayfish and smoked salmon, cream cheese and cucumber and egg mayonnaise.  The scones were fresh baked, some filled with dried fruits, and served with clotted cream, spiced fruit jam and, much to Jo’s delight as it is one of her most favourite things in the world, lemon curd. 
The cake and pastries were the crowning glory though.  Each one invoked the soul of autumn in every flavourful morsel.  There was sticky maple and pecan tartlets, spiced apple trifle with walnuts and brandy soaked pieces of lady finger, moist chocolate brownies and pumpkin cake topped with cinnamon cream.   
I was chatting with The Demon Gin a few days after this, comparing notes on afternoon tea, and she noted that her fella had commented that, for the price of an average afternoon tea, he could get an enormous steak, pile of chips and a few beers.  Well, yes, I'm not going to argue with that, but afternoon tea is more than just the pots of tea and scones.  It's the entire experience - being in luxurious surroundings, waited on hand and foot, spending time with your nearest and dearest and, for a few hours at least, escaping from the real world.  Eastwell manages to carry this off with finesse.
The tea menu is extensive.  I opted for the Eastwell blend, a mixture of Assam and Ceylon teas that was perfect for me.  Ellie, being the only non-tea drinker with us, had an entire teapot of hot chocolate prepared for her at no extra charge.  The solid silver milk jugs added a touch of luxury to the meal.  They were seriously heavy!
Afternoon tea never looks as though it will be enough to sate your appetite, but we had to be rolled out when we had finished, and there were still a couple of items left uneaten.  We had been there for a good few hours and had been left to enjoy ourselves, the tea and the surroundings in peace by the staff, only occasionally being interrupted to see if there was anything else we required.  
Post tea, we went for a stroll around the gardens, partly to walk off some of our excesses, partly to enjoy the surroundings.  It is from the gardens that the most impressive views of Eastwell can be enjoyed.   
I didn’t know the girls when I got married, so I showed them the Italian garden where our ceremony took place.   It looked a bit forlorn in the early evening light; the last time I was there the place had been bursting with flowers and blooms in every colour imaginable.  The views back over the down's are still as impressive as ever though.



The grounds really are beautiful, wide avenues flanked by meticulously trimmed hedges leading onto sweeping lawns and the great fountain presiding over it all quietly in the centre.
However it is the Manor that draws my eye time and time again, the mishmash of neo-Elizabethan and Victorian-Tudor style architecture forming an utterly recognisable silhouette against the skyline, lead piped windows and red ivy covering the grey brick work.
Given the choice, I would happily stay here forever.
If you like (or hate!) what you have read, please do let me know in the comments below or slap me with a cheeky follow, or say Hi to me on my facebook group or twitter!

Monday 10 November 2014

La Finta Giardiniera‎

"People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul"- Edward Lewis, Pretty Woman
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
As someone who purports to love theatre in all its wondrous forms, I am slightly shamefaced to admit that I have never seen a live opera.  I have watched a number of them curled up on the sofa with a mug of tea courtesy of Sky Arts, but I have never experienced the wonder of being sat in a theatre and letting the music just wash over me.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Therefore when Glyndebourne offered me the chance to come and see one of their touring shows at the Marlowe theatre, I jumped at the opportunity. 
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Glyndebourne tours their Summer Festival shows, which meant that over a three day period, they were presenting three individual operas: La Traviata, The Turning of the Screw and La Finta Giardiniera‎.  As it happened, I was off work on annual leave the week that they were visiting Canterbury (it was performance week for House of Bernada Alba), so I was on stage every evening at the Gulbenkian Theatre which ruled out all evening operas for me unfortunately.  Luckily there was a matinee performance of La Finta Giardiniera‎.  It finished at 5.30pm, I needed to be at the theatre to get ready at 6.30pm – it was fate.
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
My Mum was also free, so I did what any good daughter would do, and offered her one of the two tickets that Glyndebourne had so kindly gifted me.  I also invited her to take me out to lunch at Deeson’s first (OK, I did offer to pay, but apparently that violates a few laws of nature in her book and I wasn't going to argue).
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
The weekend beforehand, I was at my parents’ house for mum's birthday, and my sister presented me with a chart.  It's was the love plot of La Finta Giardiniera (complete with keys that I still don't fully understand).  To say it was complicated was an understatement.  Armed only with this knowledge of what the opera was about, I was a little wary that I wouldn't fully understand what on earth was happening.
I needn't have worried.  Not only was the Italian Baroque Opera, directed by Freddie Wake Walker supertitled and the characters so fully developed it was easy to follow what was happening, but we were also treated to an introduction about what to expect.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
The plot is fairly simplistic and filled with stock characters.  Violante / Sandrina, the titular Garden Girl, is stabbed by her lover, Belfiore for reasons still not quite clear to me at the start of the opera.  She heals and decides to adopt a disguise as the Garden Girl (Sandrina), presumably to avoid her quite frankly violent lover.  Belfiore meanwhile goes and gets himself engaged to Arminda, the snobbish niece in fantastic dresses of the Mayor (Don Anchise (Il Podestà).  Serpetta is the Mayor’s maid and has a serious crush on him, whilst Nardo, Sandrina’s fellow servant, is desperately in love with Serpetta, whilst she scorns him.  Arminda has an ex-lover hanging around her, trying to win her back (Ramiro) whilst, just to ensure that everything is neat and tidy, Don Anchise is also trying to win the love of Sandrina.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014

The opera explores the twists and turns of the convoluted love lives of the seven characters and becomes especially interesting when Sandrina and Belfiore meet again, prior to their descent into madness.  They recognise each other, much to Sandrina's dismay, forcing her to maintain her pretense.  Themes of madness, the natural environment competing with the rigid formality of the Rococo interior, spurned love and class boundaries all run throughout the opera, which was composed by Mozart when he was 19 years old.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
La Finta translates as the False, or The Pretend Garden Girl, and pretense is a running theme of the production.  Not only are we watching actors, pretending to be characters, but we are also theatre of the disguise, a common theme in French Baroque drama of the time (Violante, the Marchionesse is in disguise as Sandrina, the Garden Girl).  We are also watching characters who are unsure what they are feeling, pretend to feel emotions, trying them out for size until they find one that fits.  To compensate for this, gestures are oversized and grand, with each character having a signature stance that they adopt at regular points throughout the opera (my favourite was Serpetta, her stance reminded me of Truly Scrumptious' doll pose in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  She was also wearing what I am sure were Irregular Choice shoes - a brand I love, which could also have biased me somewhat...).
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
As the characters become more at home in their emotions, recognising their true selves and their true feelings, everything else becomes stripped down.  They remove the layers of their extravagant costumes, wearing only their simple underclothes and bare feet.  Masks of heavy makeup are gradually removed from their faces, revealing the true individual underneath.  What is even more impressive is what happens to the set, which literally disintegrated before our eyes.  I admit, when the first door fell off its hinges, my immediate reaction was “wow, even professional companies sometimes experience mishaps”.  Then Sandrina jumped through one of the flats, leaving tattered remains behind her.  Shortly afterwards another flat crashed to the floor with a tremendous thump, demonstrating the precision of the staging as it missed Belfiore's head by inches, then two more flats rose into the air.  After that the cast just went to town, ripping the set to pieces around them until only the fireplace was left standing.  It was around then that I realised that this wasn’t just a series of mishaps, Comedy of Errors style.  Replica’s of the furniture from Act 1 were revealed to be made of paper as the chairs were torn apart, and one of the legs (a masking curtain) was ripped down.  Good lord that looked like fun!
Photo Credit:  Sam Stephenson, 2014
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Photo Credit:  Sam Stephenson, 2014
When I had first spoken to my mother about the opera, she has been cautious, having never been to see an opera before, and just as we were going in she had said she would ‘keep an open mind’.  At the interval she was smiling, by the end she had the biggest grin on her face.  She was also slightly bemused at how on earth they were going to reset everything in time for the next performance.
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
There are some reviewers out there who haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about this work, claiming that due to the fact it is one of Mozart’s earliest opera’s, it doesn’t have the elegance or finesse of what he was later capable of.  I’m no expert, and I am certainly not an opera snob, so from a pure theatre lover’s perspective, they don’t know what they are talking about.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
This was a joy to watch.  The actors were fantastic in their characterisation and stamina, the concept was clever and the music was achingly beautiful.  
Photo Credit: Richard Hubert Smith, 2014
Glyndebourne, thank you for having me.  It was a privilege.

*This was a sponsored post.  Glyndebourne provided me with two complimentary tickets to their matinee performance of La Finta Giardiniera‎at The Marlowe Theatre, however this has in no way affected my appreciation of the production.  I also would just like to say that they are a joy to work with, and my particular thanks goes to Vicky from Glyndebourne who I have been in correspondence with.

If you like (or hate!) what you have read, please do let me know in the comments below or slap me with a cheeky follow, or say Hi to me on my facebook group or twitter!