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Quenington Old Rectory
What? A satellite dish in a Shakespeare play? The narrative and dialogue were of course written by Shakespeare; but the Cotswold Arcadians' 1999 spectacular was set amongst the perpetually warring tribes of the Hindu Kush - where members of a TV satellite newsgathering team found themselves hopelessly ensnared by a change in the local balance of power amongst the fundamentalist Mujahideen...
There were AK 47s, machine guns, even a Russian recoilless anti-tank gun and, yes, a significant amount of incoming mortar and shell fire... a lot of smoke... and a broken elbow suffered by (it had to be, hadn't it?) the character El Bhow... but he nobly played out the run. With a budget now expanded to the order of some £30,000 and a production team of about 150 people, this production involved the active co-operation of 29 Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps at South Cerney, RAF Brize Norton, RAF Fairford, the USAF and Cotswold Land Rovers Ltd.
Those who remember Sandy Gall and Vernon Mann of ITN with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s were not surprised that the Director of Measure for Measure was Richard Cleghorn-Brown, whose technical team had made it possible for their news stories to be seen on News at Ten by putting together, and smuggling into the war-zone, the world's first modular portable satellite TV transmitter - which, as has been said, actually featured in the play along with another of his original musical scores played by the Quenington Ensemble.
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