The RSC

Back in the 1980s I was an associate member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the main benefit of which was being able to book for forthcoming productions about two weeks before tickets went on sale to the general public. At a cost of £5 a year I thought it was worth the money but resigned my membership when the cost increased substantially from one year to the next.
 
Living thirty miles or so west of London and an hour’s drive from Stratford-upon-Avon meant both RSC venues were relatively easily available so I would go fairly often. Cymbeline, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard the Second, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Plantagenets, Henry the Fifth, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth (with Derek Jacobi), and others – not always Shakespeare!
 
In the mid-1990s I took my younger daughter Jane and husband Colin to the Barbican to see As You Like It. During the interval we were enjoying a drink at the bar when I mentioned one of my long-held ambitions at the Barbican was to be having an interval drink when I would unexpectedly see someone I knew. It had never happened in any of the many times I had been there, but within two minutes of mentioning it to Jane and Colin a minister friend from Cambridgeshire came into view.
 
He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him though we didn’t have long to chat as he was attending an orchestral concert in the Barbican Concert Hall, their interval was just ending, and he was hurrying to get back in time for the second half of the concert. Nor, in the years since, has such an unexpected meeting ever happened again.
 
David Parkin

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash