play
The faeries at the bottom of the garden are building a theatre in which, they say, they intend to deliver virtuoso performances of the Vast Faerie Canon, beginning – naturally – with A Midsummer’s Night Dream, which the faeries say was writ by a fellow name of Tom, and not (as is widely believed) by that prolific wearer of ladies’ undergarments, Old Willy Shakspeare.
The Faerie Theatre will not have a roof or walls (or seats, or a stage), on account of how the faeries very much prefer the open air and are outdoorsy folk who have: a) a patient and accepting approach to the vagaries of our English weather, and b) umbrellas.
Performances will take place continuously, with a rotating cast of players, and in no particular order, and having no regard for the sense of things, as the folk reckon they like meaning more than sense and find you can fit more meaning into a paper bag than you can apples, especially if you take the apples out first.
Entrance will be free, but the audience will be assumed to be giving their own performances and artistic interpretations of the play, and may therefore be subjected to unexpected wild applause or light bombardments. All players shall be kept quite drunk with cider, berry wine and other alcohols, this libation being a little known but essential intricacy of the Craft. It is predicted that dancing or other merriment will break out, and scenes of vulgar abandon may be enacted, and obscene articles may be sung or spoken, and all participants are likely to be stupefied or struck dumb by love or liquor.
This is all quite natural and in keeping with the spirit of the play and the verse.
about a leg
There was this boy who thought he was his grandfather’s leg. The grandfather had lost his leg in the war, which at the time was the best thing that could have happened to him. It got him out of a heap of trouble, got him home, got him home Scott free. No, he’d never missed that leg, had never mourned it.
Thirty years to the day he lost his leg, his grandson was born. From an early age the boy claimed to remember his former life as a leg. As a small child the boy often claimed he was a leg standing on the hot deck of a boat in summer. Later, his grandfather told him of the boating trips on Windermere, before the war. There was a time of wet beds, of nightmares, when the boy dreamed of the bullet and the amputation. But this passed. The dreams stopped as he grew older.
The boy did his best to be a leg to his grandfather, but his grandfather stubbornly refused to treat him as anything but a small, strange boy, and wore his shiny plastic prosthesis anytime he needed the services of the missing leg. The boy grew disheartened. When his grandfather eventually died of old age, the boy was bereft.
Now he was a leg without a grandfather. His life felt small and lacking in purpose. He took to staring out of the window of his room for long hours at a time. He contemplated suicide.
One day, looking out of the window, he saw a man on crutches in the street below: a man with just one leg. The boy felt a delirious rush of excitement racing through his veins to his heart. He knew then that he could go on being a leg, if only he could find the missing body he belonged to.
For a leg cannot stand on its own two feet. It needs a will to direct it, a body to walk it, a heart to pump blood to its toes.
