Herbert Can Be Ever Ready

My husband and I will be attending the Canterbury Festival this year. We’ve heard so much about it from our very good friends who live in Canterbury, they keep begging us to come down every year, stating the Canterbury may be as wonderful as our Edinburgh Festival, but it’s much older and much more interesting. That last part, we found hard to believe, but our friends aren’t know to exaggerate. So, this year, after the Edinburgh Festival we decided to take up our dear friends offer and see if their boasting is all true or just hype.

We had our friends book a room for us in a Canterbury Hotel, they wanted to put us up, but my husband and I prefer the comforts of a hotel room rather than putting out our friends. The Festival occurs in October at the Canterbury Cathedral, the Gulbenkian Theater and other various smaller venues in and around Canterbury’s City Center. When we arrived our friends took us to our hotel room and gave us the low down. The Festival grew out of tradition of the Cathedral Play around the late 20′s which became formalized as a festival by the Dean of Canterbury. World War II interrupted the festival and it didn’t start up again until the 80′s. Today, it’s one of Southeast England’s most important arts festivals.

Thomas Becket murder was written for this festival by T.S. Eliot’s classic ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ in 1935. Currently, and new tradition of the Cathedral play was reinstated with a special commissioned work called ‘Dallas’ Sweetman’, by Sebastian Barry. So, far my husband and I were quite impressed with this festival. We attended dance, comedy, music, opera, exhibitions, and Canterbury’s own Fringe Festival, which is, like the Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, out growing the regular festival and which offers a more diversified array of theater, arts and music. Our dear friends were correct, this festival was more interesting than our Edinburgh festival, the difference was how much more friendly and less uppity the performances and the people were. We let go and let loose. We had fun.

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Filed by Herbert Jones at 12:07 pm under Entertainment,Travel
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