London, Again

We went to London again today for more-or-less the entire day and saw two shows at the National Theatre: The Hothouse by Harold Pinter and Saint Joan by Shaw. Both were really good but I’ll tell of the rest of my day first.

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Besides watching the plays, I had one really important goal to fulfill: to get aid for my iPod, which was giving me the unhappy face. That was an ominous gesture; I know that that usually means death. And it did; my iPod is dead. It’s a mystery as to what I’ll do. Clearly something must be done.

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However bad the result of my walk was, the walk itself was really pleasant. I went through the heart of the shopping district of London to get there, so I passed through Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus before heading down Regent Street to the gigantic Apple Store. Things strike you in a very understated way in London; suddenly you realize something you’ve seen, heard or smelt is very important. The style of London is so harmonious: the Victorian and the modern, from Big Ben to that gigantic egg-shaped building whose name I don’t know, all blend together. It’s the kind of understated elegance that you (where you are the city) acquire when you’ve been a top-5 most important city in the world for about four straight centuries.

For instance, take Piccadilly Circus. With its neon lights and major brands, the traffic intersection seems to be attempting its best impression of Times Square, but doesn’t quite have the courage to go full-bore, like a modest person being prodded into doing something profane. It’s crowded, to be sure, but not exactly overfull, like Times Square.

Speaking of comparisons to New York, two other things suddenly struck me while walking. The first is the comparative absence of weird people on parade. Aside from street performers, whose job it is to look weird, I’ve only seen one bizarre-looking person while in London, and that was a leathery fifty-year-old women with limp, dead blonde hair, wearing a tight white tube top. (If the image is stuck in your head, I’m sorry, but it was stuck in mine). The other is that Londoners, unlike New Yorkers, do not walk like it’s a full-contact sport. The pigeons, however, make up in aggression: at least three flew disturbingly directly at me, like something out of The Birds.

The problem with London is that it is expensive and my budget so small.

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We saw two plays at the National Theatre today. The National Theatre is a concrete modernist amalgamation of four separate stages with a “Space to Watch,” a space with free concerts and events. The two plays we saw were The Hothouse and Saint Joan. Both were very, very solid.

First up was a matinee performance of the Hothouse. Of all the plays we’ve read for our seminar, the Hothouse was my favorite, so I was happily anticipating seeing it today. It did not disappoint. The play is a sardonic black comedy and that’s how it was done. It concerns a mental institution in which things have begun to go wrong—one patient is dead and another has given birth—and the staff must figure it out. The actors were very precise, which was perfect, as the play relies on volleying banter. The stage fit the show perfectly, with its sharp angles and unlikely rooms. I enjoyed that one a lot.

Before we went to the Hothouse, we participated—randomly—in a survey with a magazine. I had no idea what was happening—I was watching a hilarious free performance (more on that later)—but I followed along with the group and was richly rewarded with these wonderful pastries: one was a donut and the other called a “flapjack.” I found both amusing at how they would confuse Americans; the donut was not fatty and not glazed and merely delicious, while the flapjack is an oats-and-honey confection. Then we had a discussion about the state of theater in England and more broadly, the world. One of the interesting questions is, how does theater fit in in the 21st century? Not well; it’s tough for art forms other than music and movies, I think, because they’re so dominant. Their dominance is probably deserved. Both communicate massively. Who, after all, can’t watch or see? The numbers who can’t are far less than the numbers who don’t have the attention span to read, or to watch a play without multitasking (I admit to multitasking while watching movies). Furthermore, both can communicate on a multiplicity of levels: both reward small and large levels of effort. Lastly, movies offer a certain totality of experience because there’s almost nothing a movie can’t do (technically speaking) nowadays. Whereas a play is bounded by the stage and a novel is bounded by imagination. That’s why the movie is the dominant intellectual phenomenon amongst our generation, I think.

After the Hothouse I went to the Apple Store, which I detailed above. I then came back and saw the free performance as a way to kill time. I’ve seen two concerts and a random trapeze show. The trapeze show was right before the survey I mentioned above. It featured a random British man in mountebank attire: with that funny flat straw hat and a green-and-black pinstriped suit. He was telling awful jokes and was oddly mesmerizing. The trapeze artist was genuinely talented but held back by the fact that she was performing to some random, disconnected story told by the mountebank. It somehow involved a mockingbird, fake blood, and a BMW. The other two free shows displayed the hidden peril inherent in new, exciting forms of music that enter via immigrants. The first was an Indian group (bhangra, perhaps?); the second, a reggae group. Suffice it to say that I’ve never seen a crowd lack so much rhythm (while simultaneously being sober) attack the dance floor so enthusiastically.

Killing time done, I went and saw Saint Joan, which was great in ways that completely twisted the Shaw text. It was visceral where Shaw was jokey; mystical where Shaw was rational; circular in its treatment of history where Shaw was dialectical (the show ends with the same image it begins with, implying that there is not so much progress in the world, whereas Shaw, a good socialist, believed firmly in progress and a dialectic). The play, unfortunately, did not do a thing about those long speeches in Saint Joan, but it was great. It featured dancing and drums and just pure energy. Joan herself was played as a child, and had a laugh with this snort at the end that was really kind of cute. I thought it was really good.

Tomorrow is free, thank god.