41/80???

On Friday I went on a fairly realistic trip to London.

For starters I only got a few hours of sleep the night before and had to wake up early to get to the station on time. The K'Nex students perfected moving like a herd in and out of public transportation this weekend, starting with St. David's station in Exeter. Reserved seats that spread the group apart? Don't worry! Everyone has meerkat-like telepathy that keeps them in tune with where each person is sitting at all times. Did we leave someone behind? Don't worry! We all emit not only a musk that allows us to identify any missing student but which leaves a scent-trail back to where they are!

And the best part was that Read Baldwin gave us 80 pounds. Yes we had to spend some on train but that meant FOOD.

But approaching London was nowhere as interesting as approaching England. There was no trepidation...it felt more obligation than adventure. For one, I have an essay to write and a scene to rehearse - I didn't exactly have time to go to London to see three plays. Not that being forced to see three plays for class is a bad thing, BY NO MEANS. I wish I could do that for class for most of my life, I think. Or maybe I'll just go see plays.

In any case, London has turned out to be I think my favorite city, and by London I mean Kensington-and-Central/Bankside/Big-Ben-and-Westminster and the surrounding areas. Because that's all I saw this weekend, except for a bit of the northeast of the city, which ...eh, okay. Ultimately I haven't seen enough to judge.

The reason I like London is that London is not a city. Not in my sense of the word at least. London, like Pittsburgh, seems to me rather a very large suburb with skyscrapers, and in this case, a handful of millenia's worth of history. A city for me is Philadelphia and New York: big, brash, loud, dirty, smelly, and most importantly overbearing. I never, really, feared for my life in London, except when crossing the street. But that's the same in Exeter. We all got lost after we got off the train out of Paddington station, and proceeded to follow the perimeter of Hyde Park until we found how to get to Kensington. We stayed at a bed and breakfast called The Vicarage (I think...). The people there were courteous and welcoming, and the building was this townhouse with four floors and red carpeting. My room had a balcony. I stood on it. And it wasn't grandiose, it wasn't flashy or gimmicky, it was just what it was. A Bed and Breakfast in a lovely white townhouse in a neighborhood of lovely white townhouses and yes, it was probably expensive as anything to live there, and yes, I got a very sheltered view of London, but I wouldn't mind living in that room and writing on that balcony. I want to go to London on my honeymoon (crossing fingers to have one...).

Mostly I didn't pick up on a sense of direction until a few days in, so I was heavily dependent on both my Oyster card and A to Z Guide, two of the most useful tools ever invented since the box. And Oyster card is essentially an EZ pass card for any public transportation within the city of London, whether double-decker buses or the Underground. An A to Z, or an "A to Zed," Guide is a book of maps of areas in the city, and an index in the back that has streets, places, and practically addresses that you can look up. You find one in the index, it tells you where to find it on the map. Brilliant!

The Underground is a fantastical adventure. Oyster cards are keys to mythic quests. I think this will be the only time I really wax whimsical in my description, because the Underground makes me go "mmm...whimsy...." For people watching it's the best, with interesting characters, and while getting in and out is hectic and especially frightening if you're trying to keep a group together, it makes up for it with really long escalators that have ads all along the walls for theater (The Wyndham Theater is doing Shadowlands! I'm trying to go back and see it.)! Plus, the street musicians are really talented. I got off a train to hear a lilting aria drifting and echoing through the tunnels to the way out. As we walked deeper into the underground and went up escalators, we found an opera singer stationed at one of the landings. She had an iPod hooked up to some speakers, playing accompaniment.

I quickly ran out of money. We saw the National Gallery, Big Ben, Westminster, then moved on to seeing The Country Wife, about which I have to write a review for class, so I'll say no more about it.

The next day we woke up, had breakfast (like the bed, it was amazing), and I promptly was separated from the main groups of people off sightseeing, and left to fend for myself with my A to Z, which I think I did. I met up with Stepahine Reiches and together we went around doing a little sightseeing, mainly St. Paul's Cathedral - I want to go to mass there so bad - and then, while looking on a map, I saw the word: Blackfriars. "The Blackfriars Theater?" I thought to myself. Little did I know there's a whole area named after the old monastery. So we wandered down to Blackfriars, the area, and realized we were running low on time before the next play. Quick, to the tube! Alas! This line is closed for the weekend for repairs! No! We'll walk (Blackfriars to Sloan Square, for anyone who knows the area)! No, we can't do that in an hour! Quick! To the double decker bus!

This is when I learned that Oyster cards work on double decker buses to. And people ask why I believe in God.

We also ended up sitting behind a blue-badge tour guide (the best kind) on his way home, named Nigel, who made sure Steph and I knew how to handle the bus. We ended up at the Royal Theater before most everyone else.

We had FRONT ROW SEATS for Rhinoceros, which is, by far, the best play I've seen in England, and certainly one of the better ones of my lifetime. I wish I was writing a review on it so I could finally get credit for being pleased with something. First of all the theater as a space was really great. The set fell apart as time went on, used dust as an image system ("This is the first play I've seen that established an olfactory sensation." - a paraphrase of Ken Worrall), and had, get this, a full bodied rhinoceros costume that charged onstage at the end of act one. And was frightening and amazing. The pacing flew by, as well, which is good because Ionesco can get very word-heavy very fast, but all of the actors flew through everything without missing a beat, which actually made it all the better. The soundtrack was, and is, haunting. As for "Rhinoceros" as a play, I wanted to hug Ionesco for being comprehensibly weird. "Thank you," I wanted to say, "for not being 'Waiting for Godot,'" which I'm sure I probably just need to see staged as well but for now I do not like. There were one or two moments in the production that were off to be, in particular the ending (spoiler?): Berenger is left alone in a world where everyone has turned into a rhinoceros. There are rhinoceros heads that have bust through every wall in his apartmnet, every door and cranny, and they're watching him. (I won't give away anything but the last moment). He picks up a shot gun and aims towards the back wall. Blackout.

Where was the gunshot? The gunshot that could have meant he killed himself or killed a rhino and we didn't know? IT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT! Apart from that, I heart that production.

I want to do Rhinoceros now, if I wasn't so sure I'd screw it up. I think that sums up all my problems as a growing director/dramatist in one statement.

And that was only a matinée. We got food at a Thai restaurant and then went to see Cloud 9, which sadly was not on the top of its game. It was a preview performance. It was the... Almay Theater? Al-something theater. As a space it was great! It's a round stage with a sort of 25% thrust audience, and a balcony that is carved out to look like it would fit with the Bolton stage (nostaliga...). The set was simply the figure of a house with a central door and two windows on an off kilter platform, and the rest of the stage around it. The man who played Betty in the first act and Edward in the second was very good - most of the cast was, really. I don't know about the second act as an actual piece of theater but it was at least interesting. One of the actors, though, did blow a line, and admitted it in front of the audience. So I might not like the second act because of that.

Cloud 9 strikes me as a play I'd really like to get into, so who knows, maybe I'll see another performance sometime. Ultimately this production didn't leave me wowed, or even sort of excited. But it was better than The History Boys.

By the way, none of this criticism is actually me trying to be critical, like formally critical. This is very much just my feelings about the shows, useless in a critical sense as they are.

That night, after we made it back to The Vicarage, I stayed up with other K'Nex students playing, in no particular order, Truth or Dare and Never Have I Ever. And I had hot chocolate.

And the next morning we went on a tour of London, highlighting Shakespeare and Dickens. St. Paul's Cathedral was another highlight of the tour, and seriously the place is pretty amazing. It was a major target of Hitler's during the Battle of Britain (apparently) and so there were Fire Watchers (I think that's the term) stationed at the very top of the dome that tied ropes to secure themselves and would climb along the dome with tongs and pales of sand. When a firebomb would come down on St. Paul's, they'd climb down onto the dome, take the bomb and extinguish it. If a firebomb went through the ceiling onto the rafters, they'd climb down there too.

Our tourguide was sure to point out all the good pubs along the way, and even went by the site of the Blackfriar's theater, which was tucked away amidst the buildings that were constructed on top of its ruins, since it was torn down the Puritans, a fact I had forgotten before I went looking for it.

We ended by visiting the Globe and then hopping over to an open air food market which sold great, and expensive, food. Then there were plenty of trainrides home, from there to dealing with stuff having cropped up all weekend, watering the basil, from there to rehearsal, from rehearsal back home to check my email to find out that the study I participated in, measuring facial recognition and levels of empathy, gave me a 41/80 on an empathy scale.

41/80!? 41/80!? I always thought of myself as more than 51% empathetic. Maybe I need to work on that, if the test is even right. So a busy weekend was met with bad news. Hopefully it'll be a good week, though.