People arriving at the Assembly Rooms for the Caledonian Hunt Ball in the late 18th century as imagined in Edinburgh's Georgian Shadows event celebrating the 250th anniversary of Craig's plan for the New Town.  It makes for an interesting stroll in the early evening from Register House to Charlotte Square by way of St Andrew Square and George Street.

The Queen's Hall is another fine Georgian building though fifty years or so younger than the Assembly Rooms.  One thing I particularly like about it is its intimacy, the closeness to the action.  The SCO had a choir on stage for Mozart's Coronation Mass which brought the band another twenty feet or so further into the body of the kirk so that I was practically sitting amongst them.  Although I was very happy to hear that in a year or two they will have a new home in the hall to be built on the site of the Royal Bank offices I once worked in behind St Andrew Sq.  I fear some of that family feeling will be lost.

Family feeling of a different sort was on view at The Lyceum where The Winter's Tale has just finished its run. On fairly slim evidence King Leontes decides his wife has been having it off with his best chum (the king of Bohemia), orders the chum's murder (though he forewarned escapes), banishes his new-born daughter to be exposed to the wilderness where wild beasts roam in the firm belief that she's not his, arraigns his wife and casting aside the report of the Oracle on her chasteness as false news declares the trial must continue with a death sentence as the probable outcome when enters a messenger.

The king's son brooding on the queen his mother's fate has died.  Understandably she swoons but less understandably Leontes suddenly realises that's he's a tosser and all his jealousy has been misplaced.  The queen is taken off for medical attention but her woman is back in a jiffy to report that it's too late, she's dead.

Now this is classed as one of Shakespeare's comedies but up to this point the laughs have been few.  Luckily the atmosphere brightens.  The scene switches to Bohemia, the wee baby is rescued by a comic shepherd and his son, sixteen years pass, it's the sheep shearing festival, the baby is now a comely maid and is beloved by the Bohemian prince. We enjoy the rib-tickling comic turns that the bard provided for his groundlings, made actually comprehensible and funny in this production.  There is music and dancing and much jollity but alack and alas it doesn't last.

Polixenes (king of Bohemia and unmurdered chum of Leontes) turns up and berates his son for dallying with a shepherdess, unaware that's she's really a princess.  Everybody including herself is unaware though the old shepherd must at least suspect she's from a different social class than him given the money she had about her person in the wild woods all those years ago.

Florizel and Perdita (our young lovers) are advised to go off and introduce themselves to Leontes who rouses himself from the torpor he's been in for sixteen years and says how he wishes he could make things up to his old chum.  Said old chum is pursuing Florizel angrily but on finding him with Leontes a reconciliation takes place, Perdita is identified as the onetime cast out princess and a statue of the dead queen comes to life.  Could it be she wasn't dead but in hiding all those years?

Whatever, all is now happiness and Leontes and his queen go off arm in arm.  The young lovers have their parents' blessing and all the subsidiary characters are in a good way.  So it's a comedy after all.  But not quite.  Shakespeare has left Leontes' son still dead and the good old retainer who was charged with getting rid of the baby.  Truly a tragi-comedy then.

It all sounds a bit daft but it was an excellent production, thoroughly enjoyable and I says so who saw it twice.