Portland Center Stage

Ahhhhhhh, London!

Posted by Chris Coleman | 07 May 2010 | Comments (0)

I recently had the great pleasure of travelling to London with a group of our subscribers to see the sites and take in plays. I decided to stay a few extra days to squish in extra plays as well. Here is my journal: April 25 Exhausted after 12 hours on the plane today. PDX to Dallas for a layover, then 9 hours to Heathrow. Favorite billboard on the way into the city, “Sod the Lot” (the Conservative party urging voters to get rid of the party in power). 

We’re staying in Kensington, a lovely area between Hyde Park and Chelsea. I’ve heard people speaking Italian, Farsi, Spanish, Sudanese (guessing), Thai, Russian, you name it. Amazing mix of people walking the streets. But the streets themselves are clean and pleasant (in my three hours of wandering today I encountered 2 homeless people). Lots of nice, big apartments in brownstones, you can see in the windows and almost no one has color on the walls. What up with that? Reading Billy Wilder’s (the author/director of the movie Sunset Boulevard) biography on the plane. Fascinating guy who grew up in a family of hoteliers in Poland and Vienna. He started out as a reporter (and gigolo/dancer) in Berlin, and then worked his way into making films. He immigrated to the states in 1933 shortly after Hitler was given real power by Hindenburg. The group gathered for our welcome dinner this evening. Besides us PCS folks, there are travelers from Phoenix Theater Company, the McCallum Center in Palm Desert, Lakeview Theater, and Walnut Street in Philadelphia.

Monday May 26 

Fun day starting with our bus tour of the city. Was great to be reminded of the lay of the land, and to see how much has transformed since I was last here fifteen years ago. The high point was our stop at the ‘reproduction’ of the Globe Theater in Southwark (pr: “Suth-erk”). 

(I loved this table that was set up to look like it might have for costume construction in Shakespeare's day.) The exhibit about the physical and social world surrounding the Globe was totally engrossing (including a timeline revealing among other things that Sir Francis Drake claimed California for the Brits in 1579, prior to Shakespeare penning a play. Bizarre.) Also didn’t realize how many of his plays were actually written after Elizabeth I had died. 

The tour of the theater itself was interesting, especially the statistic our guide shared that the original had seated 3000, with 1000 standing in the ‘pit’ down front. There were no restrooms, so people just peed into the floor of the pit, or in the stairwells. Must have been quite a smelly place, and what a challenge for an actor onstage. 

The Tate Modern Art Gallery is within feet of the Globe in a stunning old building that has been carved out by the architect so that the interior (the size of an aiport hangar) is left fundamentally open, the galleries themselves tucked in along the façade and on the building’s roof. A new bridge (The Millenium Bridge) was constructed in 2003 to connect St. Paul’s Cathedral to the New Tate and the Globe, and the area around them is exploding with condos and businesses. Very cool. http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/transformingtm/

I somehow misunderstood where we were supposed to meet up after lunch (I was waiting inside the lobby by the big fake tree), and arrived outside just in time to see the bus pull away. Ahhhhhhh. So I had my first adventure with the Tube (subway) system on my own. Pretty easy, actually – and surprisingly clean and artistically designed. 

Then this evening, we saw ENRON – the new play by Lucy Prebble inspired by the rise and fall of ‘the most innovative company in the world’. It is a fascinating play (think of how Itamar Moses might have attacked the subject, if he’d decided to throw in a few dance numbers and a song or two). I was somehow expecting a fullout musical, but it wasn’t really that. I thought the writing quite strong, and it managed to distill the insanity and complexity of the story into something both digestible and entertaining. The style with which the piece was directed was a bit jarring. The ensemble was led by Samuel West (I most remember him as Helena Bonham Carter’s love interest in Howard’s End, but he’s also got a slew of West End and BBC credits) as Jeffrey Skilling and was quite strong. Tim Piggot Smith played Ken Lay and is a wonderful actor, but I felt a bit too cartoony in the role. The rest of the ensemble has the very difficult task of having to transform into multiple roles, do a few dance numbers and sing a bit. I didn’t feel they really pulled it off, and the accents were not that great. It was quite controversial with our group. Some really enjoyed it, some thought it a bore, at least one hated it (said it felt like a Brit attacking America). I found it very engaging, and could totally imagine PCS producing and our audiences getting into it.

Tuesday, April 26 

Fun walking tour this morning with our guide, Beverly – who has this deliciously musical well-toned accent. (The vivacity of the different dialects is just astounding. If anyone thought the dialects from 39 Steps were over the top, they would be wrong. The concierge at the hotel sounds exactly like the Artful Dodger in Oliver, and a woman I passed on the tube yesterday sounded precisely like Christine Calfas’s North Country milkmaid from Steps.) 

We started out at St. James’s Park (the final 's' is pronounced, which sounds a little funny) – which is lovely to begin with, but we hit it on a warm, sunny Spring day with the tulips bursting into bloom, and the geese (and pelicans) sunning lazily on the waterway. Beverly shared that because Londoner’s yards are either nonexistent or miniscule, the city’s parks are quite important and St. James manages to feel both beautifully designed, and wonderfully human, even a bit natural right in the heart of the city’s chaos. 

Coming out the other side we looked down the street to see Buckingham Palace (the street is paved red in honor of her Majesty’s processionals), and St. James’s Palace was right in front of us. Henry VIII built it for Anne Boleyn when he moved Jane Seymour into his quarters, but today it’s mostly used to entertain foreign dignitaries, and house special friends of the royal family (Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter currently resides there while she goes to university). 

We spilled out onto Charing Cross Road which used to be known for its used book shops, only a remnant of which still remain. And then into Covent Garden, and to the steps of St. Peter’s Church, which Beverly explained would have been the place Eliza sold flowers at the beginning of Pygmalion. By bus across the river, West of the Globe to the National Theater complex. It is huge and monolithic and in stark contrast to the primarily 18th and 19th century facades surrounding St. James’s park. The National opened its first theater (the Lyttleton) in 1976, when Laurence Olivier was the company’s first artistic director. It now produces about 22 productions a year in three theaters, with a budget of about 60M pounds (roughly $90M). That’s about twice the size of the largest non-profit theater in the States. And fully 30 percent of their budget comes from the government’s arts council (that figure would likely be around 13 percent at the most highly subsidized theater in America). 

We got a great tour through the company’s scene shops, and paint shop (Geno, our scenic artist would be salivating over the ‘paint frame’ which covered an entire wall of the shop, and has a hydraulic lift to move the painter anywhere he wants to go on the canvas.) The set onstage in the Lyttleton (about 850 seats) was for Howard Davies’ production of The White Guard, an adaptation of Bulgakov’s novel about the Russian revolution (for any of you who saw The Last Station, Bulgakov was the young writer who found himself torn between Tolstoy and the Countess). The set was huge, and richly detailed naturalistically, and they showed us how the entire apartment moves up and downstage on a wagon; and two scenes appear and disappear into the traps in the floor (definitely envied them that ability). The set on the Olivier (the 1100 seat thrust theater), was for Women Beware Women, and our guide explained their ability to use multiple revolves and elevators to keep scene changes fluid through a production. (They even have an operating revolve that is the correct size in the rehearsal hall: that’s a first for me.) New phrases: ‘give me the smackers’: give me your money; ‘gives me the git’: gives me a pain (ie. My back is giving me the git.) Then this evening: War Horse adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s book by Nick Stafford, and directed by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott for the National. It was a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa and was truly extraordinary. It’s hard to describe because indeed it did utilize puppets, but for instance, the central character – a horse named “Joey” was performed by three different puppeteers at a time, and it honestly looked as if this animal was breathing, thinking, hearing, responding. Same for the other horses, and the goose (hilarious), and the birds. It was uncanny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-bni4QqSv4 The whole production was designed by Rae Smith (frequent collaborator with Marianne Elliot) and felt like a great film telling of the piece. I mean by that, that the visuals were so detailed, and the music so powerful – that it felt like you were watching the actual events occurring, even though you could always see the puppeteers in action. The music was mostly acapella, and sounded as if it sprang from English folk songs. The story takes place just prior to and during WWI, and centers on a young farm boy’s relationship with a special horse he trains from youth. Amazing battle scenes, and even a tank onstage (again a puppet), and the ensemble (of I believe 40) sounded gorgeous on the musical numbers as well. It was deeply moving by the end, and one of those experiences (like Cirque du Soleil, or Theatre du Complite), where you understand there is some pure genius of imagination at work in the creation of what you are seeing. Truly astonishing. During the performance I sat next to a woman who grew up in London, but currently lives with her husband in Singapore. He is in r&d for Cadbury (the chocolate company), and they spent 6 years in NJ. She was quite interesting, and was in town to visit her 21 year old son who is studying theater production. I asked what she liked about Singapore (she had already disclosed that it is 100 degrees and humid all year round). She hesitated, then offered: “It’s quite safe. My 15 year old daughter can go out with her friends, and I know she will return unharmed. There are no drugs. If you are caught in possession of illegal drugs you face the death penalty. They actually have hangings every Friday. It’s quite different, actually.” Wednesday, April 28th I’ve decided that Londoners are by and large quite friendly, though they are absolutely the pits at giving directions. I have probably asked 12 different people on the street where such and such a street is. To a person, they have had no idea. Even when the street was a block over. Even when it was the street they were walking down. Tonight, I walked across a bridge, and asked a young, well-dressed couple ‘Which way is the National Theatre?” They looked at each other and shrugged. I said, “You don’t know where the National Theatre is?” They said, “Sorry.” I walked about fifty steps and saw the HUGE banners outside that read NATIONAL THEATRE, and thought, “Hmmm. Perhaps this is the National Theatre.” This morning we took the bus (‘coach’ in their parlance) to Stratford upon Avon. (I forgot to take my camera, sorrrrrry.) A lovely drive out of the city, and into the countryside, which is green, green, many shades of green. Our guide, Liz, was hysterical. She taught us about the economic value of sheep, (“They MADE us, really, those sheep. Our fortunes were built on all that wool.”); their mating habit (“They actually attach a bag of die to the rams’ bellies, so that they mark the girls when they’re doing their business. That way the shepherd knows when the babies will come to term. And the rest of us know which are the popular girls, and which are going to need a bit of encouragement.”); and the Queen (“She has her own airport, actually. On each trip she carries three complete changes of clothes for every day. Plus one black suit, just in case someone dies. You never know. And she doesn’t own a passport, she just waves a pound note about and says, ‘See, it’s me.’) We arrived in Stratford and first did a quick tour of Anne Hathaway’s cottage (which is actually rather sizable). The garden was in full, glorious bloom and beautiful. The house itself is quite simple, and I was most interested by how low the ceilings are (to keep it warmer); how they baked in a tiled area above the fireplace; and what was in the bedding (wool stuffed into linen). Then we stopped off in town and toured Shakespeare’s birthplace (which was equally interesting primarily as an example of a 16th century home, since I don’t really believe the guy from Stratford wrote the plays). But the town is quite charming and I walked over to the RSC’s middle sized theatre (the main complex is closed for renovation) and bought a couple of books (one by Peter Hall revealed on the back that he founded the RSC in 1958 at Stratford. Interesting, I hadn’t realized that.) On the way home, Liz gave us a quick primer on the current elections (coming up next week), which is the first in Britain to feature a televised debate, and has thrust a third party candidate (Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats) into a tie with the leaders of the other two parties. I was curious to learn that they only have an election when the Prime Minister calls for one (he actually goes to the Queen and asks her to dissolve Parliament, and then they have only one month for the election. That would be different). Interesting statistics: in England you can enlist in the army at 16, but you can’t be on the front line until 18. You can have consensual heterosexual sex when you are 16. But you can’t drive or drink until you are 17. And you can’t have same-sex relations until you are 18. Go figure. This evening to Women Beware Women at the National. I was excited as WBW is a play I had not read or seen (by Thomas Middleton a contemporary of Shakespeare’s), it was on the Olivier Stage (where I’d not seen a performance), and was directed by Marianne Elliot (who I’d seen at the helm of Warhorse the night before). It also featured the wonderful actress Harriet Walter, who I’d heard such great things about in Mary Stuart on Broadway last year. (She also recently played the Dowager Queen in The Young Victoria.) The play concerns an innocent young couple who are very much in love. The beautiful young girl catches the eye of the older and deeply corrupt Duke of Florence, he has her brought to him and rapes her. She rejects her husband and turns into a cynic, eventually going to live with the Duke. Her husband is humiliated and furious, and is successfully wooed by an older, wealthy woman at court, Livia. It gets pretty complicated, but suffice it to say that everyone ends up dead. It was a rather bizarre production, I thought. The actors were all very skillful, and watchable and not too over the top. The verse was clear and energetic and pretty simple (for the most part). But I never felt the production mined the danger at the heart of this world, or the agony of the moral decisions at its core. When the Duke summons the young girl in front of her husband – in Shakespeare’s world had the husband refused, they could both have been executed. But nothing close to that level of weight was in play. It was set on a big grand revolve that seemed to want to have something to do with Italy in the 40’s (was the Duke supposed to connect visually to Mussolini), but the servants wore doublets with black jeans, and the young fool was dressed as a contemporary punk. And the music was kind of slow jazz. It wasn’t boring, and was pretty clear. It just didn’t seem to cohere. Or reveal the center of the play. The director also seemed to run out of ideas about how to stage it, and would default to having the actor step down center and speak loudly and clearly to us. Now, granted there are a lot of asides built in to the text. But I didn’t feel like they were asking why that information needed to be hidden, or covert. Okay: there was something very Elizabethan about the public complicity in the storytelling directly to the audience (they would after all have performed in the open air, in daylight, with the groundlings inches away from them at times) – but we aren’t in Elizabethan England today, and it felt like the psychology of the characters hadn’t been excavated. I couldn’t decide if it was the sheer scale and shape (three quarter thrust) of the Olivier that pulled the director into this uber presentational direction (maybe you just can’t be heard if you aren’t front and center), or if she was making a stylistic choice (Brecht and Shaw both argued that Shakespeare’s intent in much of his ideological language was to speak directly to the audience. That the IDEAS of the play would have been delivered that bluntly, and both Shaw and Brecht can sometimes benefit from moments of that kind of straight shooting), but in Women Beware Women, it felt lazy somehow to me. I also felt that as skilled as the actors were, they were standing outside of their characters and explaining them very intelligently to us, rather than living inside the real danger, anguish and moral complexity of the situations in the story. Anyhoo. Glad I saw it, but not my fav. Thursday, April 29 My phone is acting really weird: can’t find the time zone and says it’s July 18th. Whatever. Slept a little later this morning and decided to do a museum day. Took the Tube to St. Paul’s, walked across the Millennium bridge to the Tate Modern. 

Really incredibly designed building. I love how they left so much of the interior volume free, so you get the sense of an airport hangar/temple on the inside. I also love that the floors are rough hewn wood, and imperfect. Each floor has somewhere to eat on it, and the main café has a full lunch and dinner menu. I got it after awhile, because the place sucks you in and you want to stay all day, so you need sustenance. After awhile I was getting tired of standing so I sat at these uber cool interactive screens (reminded me of our historoscope), where you pulled the speaker to your ear, and got to choose which of the early twentieth century abstract movements you wanted to learn about. It was very fun and playful, but also helped you get a sense of the philosophical thrust behind the movements and their creators. For example: the abstract expressionists wanted to forgo trying to represent an actual object on canvas, even in abstract form. They wanted the canvas to become an arena, upon which an event was occurring. Think Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I walked through the exhibit that included many of their paintings, and understanding that I wasn’t supposed to try and ‘figure them out’, gave me an entirely new experience. 

[This was actually my favorite piece in the museum: A deserted VW Van, dragging sleds loaded with rescue equipment. The mind reels and delights.] Then upstairs to the Van Doesburg & the International Avant-Garde exhibit. Theo van Doesburg was one of the leading figures in the development of geometric abstraction. I had never heard of him, and it was fascinating to read that he had become inspired both by the discovery of subatomic particles and theosophy (a hindu inspired spiritual movement in England early 20th century, that among other things taught the interconnectedness of everything, and that at its most fundamental all matter was vibration). He and his compatriots (he launched a publication and school called De Stijl sought to distill things to their most visually essential and limited themselves to a severe geometric and color palette. It was fascinating to watch their ideas then find expression in poster art, typography, then evolve and influence Constructivism, Dada, and the Bauhaus architectural movement. For awhile I was thinking, ‘well this is cool – but did it ever go anywhere.’ Then I moved into the ‘design and architecture’ room and realized that if you changed the color palette, you could actually say that many of the buildings constructed in the Pearl district in the last decade were influenced by Van Doesburg and his comrades. Huh. 

This evening to Love Never Dies, the new Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, that is a sequel to Phantom of the Opera. Some in the group loved the singing and visuals. Others thought the story was unengaging. Most agreed that the second half was better than the first. I was befuddled by it all. 

Two things that one of the guides taught us today: the phrase “going to throw him in the Clink”, originated here in London, as the prison was located on CLINK street, near the Globe Theatre. Also, when the Anglican church was trying to build a new home church after the big fire of 1666 (St. Paul’s Cathedral), they borrowed money from what is now called Westminster Abbey, as apparently at the time it was home to the city’s wealthiest church-goers. The Abbey at the time was called St. Peter’s Westminster Church. Thus the phrase: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Ahhh the delight. Friday, April 29 To Windsor Castle by bus. About a 45 minute drive into the town of Windsor, then a walk up to the castle itself. Huge, imposing and kind of gorgeous. Inside you do feel protected from the outside world, which I assume was its original purpose. First pieces of it were constructed around 1180 A.D., and it is set on the first piece of real estate West of the Thames on high ground, so you would have been able to see an enemy approaching about 12 miles off. 

We arrived just in time to see the changing of the guard, which was deliciously formal with a full marching band piping away. Then a look at Queen Mary’s Doll House, which looks like a giant model of a castle, with every tiny working thing one would expect to see inside such (including four Rolls Royce’s, and bathtubs, baby carriages, crazy). The castle itself is the largest in the world and the oldest that is still used for official functions. It is giiiiiiiinormous inside, and we were only seeing a fraction of the rooms (mostly the rooms in which the Queen does business, greets visitors, bestows honors, or holds state dinners). The artwork on the walls is astounding: Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt – all they’d need to do to eliminate the national debt would be to sell the paintings in one room. 

We saw Henry VIII’s armor, and the grave sites of many of the former monarchs. Then this evening to the National to see Alan Bennett’s new play The Habit of Art. It is set at a rehearsal for a new play about the relationship between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten: both brilliant, complex personalities, who struggled with their homosexuality throughout their careers. Bennett most recently penned The History Boys, but first came to my attention with Another Country back in the 80’s. Nicholas Hytner directed, and Richard Griffiths stars as Auden (he won the Olivier and Tony for the old professor in History Boys), Frances de La Tour played the Stage Manager, and Alex Jennings play Britten. It was just superrrrrrb. The writing was smart as hell, and hysterical. The performances were perfection: both completely spontaneous, easy, and deeply detailed and precise. And the play manages to ask thorny questions about our relationship to art, desire, the public and immortality. Just fantastic. 

Saturday Morning, May 1 Other random thoughts: on our walking tour, Beverly talked about why they drive on the left instead of the right. In the days when the monarchy still had real political power, the country was not a meritocracy thus all advancement was through the King. So if you wanted to move up or to be considered for an official appointment, you had to go to Court. It was a sword-bearing society, and you always wore your sword in public, as a point of decorum. And the sword was worn on the left. If you walked on the right, your swords would run into each other as you passed the guy in front of you, so they walked, and rode on the left, and it has just held over with cars. The tricky thing now is that because there has been such inmigration from other parts of the European Union, where most folks walk/drive on the right, walking down the sidewalk or a set of stairs seems to generally be a confusing enterprise, and no one knows where to go. 

In my time here I’ve seen about four homeless people. Wondering what that is about. Am I just not in the right neighborhood? Is the safety net (National Health Care, which I assume includes mental health) so much stronger that fewer people end up on the street? Are the laws for panhandling much more stringent? It is a marked contrast from Portland. [Fin Kennedy would later explain: ‘you’re in rather a posh neighborhood. If you get out into East London, you’d see more. But honestly, not like you see in the States.’] Last night at the theater, I sat next to a young woman who had just dashed in off the street at the last minute thinking, “You know I haven’t been to the theatre in a long while.” She was lucky enough to nab a returned ticket right in the middle of the theatre. She works in costumes (sounds like a dresser) for the Royal Opera, and seems to love it. When I mentioned that I was from Portland, Oregon she said, “Ohhhhhhhh I’ve heard that’s lovely. It’s supposed to be very artsy and creative, yes?” I told her a bit about it, and said that one of the things I noted about the difference between PDX and London, is the markedly fewer tattoos, piercings, wild haircuts you see on the street here. She was interested in that, but also said if I took the train East to Hackney or so, I might encounter more variety in that regard. * Had lunch today with Fin Kennedy, the author of How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. We had met when he came out for the opening and had agreed to meet at the café at the Royal Court, where we would be seeing Posh, Laura Wade’s new play. Fin and his girlfriend, Jamie, (who came with him for the PDX trip) have moved down to Brighton. She was completing a Master’s in documentary filmmaking there, and it is Fin’s hometown, so it seemed a great opportunity to get out of the big city, while still being only an hour away. He seems quite happy with the choice. 

[He hates this picture] He teaches two days a week in an inner city school in East London, where much of the student body is made up of 2nd and 3rd generation Bangladeshis. He teaches playwrighting to both the students and the faculty, and for the past few years has written a play specifically for the students to perform, and taken it to the Edinburgh Festival (where they seemed to have been a big hit). This season they’ve rented out a space in London to perform the new piece. The teaching gig pays well enough to cover his expenses and free up the rest of his time to write. 

He’s also got a new piece he calls a modern day Jacobean tragedy set in the London Financial world. Sounds really interesting. We talked about everything: the political race (Fin is traditionally a supporter of the Green party, but may vote for the Liberal Democrats this time, as he is so disappointed in the Labor Party who he feels has completely abandoned its mission of fighting for the working class.) Dialects: I was trying to place his, which he called a Southern accent, “Most everyone in Brighton would sound a bit like me.” But to my ear he sounds almost cockney at times, with dropped t’s (party becomes ‘pah-ee’), and he explained that his Dad was Irish, but his Mom grew up in East London, so perhaps he picked up some of her sounds. Jamie met us before the play. 

She was also a teacher in a tough inner city school, and is now making documentary films, some of which center around educational issues, one which centers on “Pigeon Fanciers”: people who raise, nurture and race carrier pigeons. Who knew? Ed (an attorney friend of Fin’s from college), and his partner, Pierre, joined us as well. Posh – is about “The Riot Club”, an ultra elite club comprised of college age guys from the upper echelons of the country’s ruling class. It has apparently been around for centuries, and their claim to fame are these wild drunken binges, in which they destroy everything around them and then pay for it. The story is set just prior to and during one such binge, and was staged and played like a dinner conversation, with quick, constantly overlapping dialogue. It was well played, and interestingly observed – and sometimes hard for my ear to catch the words. And as I said to Fin at intermission: “I do hope they all die by the end.” I think that was the playwright’s intention – but jeez I just hated these snotty, uber-entitled, racist prigs. And as I said to Ed, ‘If I walked into a room of guys like that in the States I would think they were all gay (I meant the ‘fanciness’ with which they were acting.) He laughed and said, “Ahh, I can see that. But in fact, that is pretty close to what you might experience if you were stuck in a room of the real aristocracy. There can definitely be a sense of eccentricity, elegance, or prissiness you might call it. Interesting. The second act was more engaging and more violent, and you could see more clearly that the playwright is writing about this upper layer of the society that feels itself pushed aside, and doesn’t know what to do about it. The kid who ends up getting them in a load of shit gives a ranting speech at the end of act one about how they have to ‘take back the country that belongs to them’. It was pretty startling stuff to hear spoken aloud. The audience around me clearly understood the world she was writing about (not necessarily because they were ‘of’ it) and laughed a great deal. [This audience was strikingly young – maybe average age of 35]. One section that really struck me was when the drunken lads were complaining about all the ‘tourists’ that have to tromp through their ‘houses’ now. One of them said something like, “One of the guides told me I couldn’t go beyond the velvet rope, and I told her, “Of course I can, because I LIVE here.” Freaky after having just been in Windsor Castle. We all talked at length about the show afterward. Liked the play (though Fin and I agreed that there wasn’t enough of a dramatic motor in act one); hated the characters (which I believe is the intent), and couldn’t imagine an American audience responding to it. 

Oh: the Royal Court is a wonderful space, I’d guess the mainstage seats 350, with two shallow balconies - so the audience is quite close to the action. And its in a gorgeous old building that has been renovated to be both comfortable and sexy while retaining the original flavor. Then back this evening to see The Empire in the upstairs space at the Royal Court. Fin, Jamie and Ed joining me. The upstairs theater seats about 100, and we walked into the set which looked like a corner of a bombed out building in the Middle East. (actual concrete/gravel, dirt on the floor (nice touch). The story centers around a prisoner taken in Afghanistan by British soldiers. The prisoner looks Pakistani, and is believed to be Taliban (and perhaps to have wounded one of the Brits in a raid that morning). He is unconscious at the top of the play, and when he wakes up and speaks in a working class British accent, all expectations are set on their head. Is his story about going to Pakistan for vacation, crossing the border to visit a friend and being kidnapped, the truth, or an elaborate cover? Should he be shot, or released? Great tension, and pretty strong acting throughout. I had a tough time with the premise because I didn’t believe a British soldier would believe anyone of Pakistani descent would be stupid enough to try and cross the border into Afghanistan with the conflict boiling the way it is today. But Fin, Ed and Jamie all bought into that (Jamie said it actually reminded her of stories from her kids in school. Apparently there is a huge joke that you can’t let your parents send you back to Pakistan or Bangladesh for Summer break, or you’ll come back married to some idiot who doesn’t speak English.) They were all really intrigued by the play, as for them it seemed to speak to the fundamental class identities in British society: the Posh Officer, who clearly comes from the upper classes; the working stiff, who is tasked with doing the officer’s dirty work (the cockney soldier); and the immigrant whose loyalty is an open question, and whose anger lies just beneath the surface. Stayed after with the three of them talking for a long time. Jamie talked about how prejudiced her students were against “freshies” (new immigrants just off the boat), and that the immigrants who had already made it into the system were not at all interested in helping others get in. Fin taught me the phrase: ‘naf’ – which one could translate as “tacky, kitschy or lame”. Sunday May 2, 2010 Rainy and cold today. Had to nab an umbrella from the front desk to battle the elements. Made my way to Shakespeare’s Globe for Macbeth. My seat was what you might call a ‘box seat’, but given the shape of the audience, we were really behind the actors when they were downstage. Interesting that we could hear pretty well, but you did appreciate when someone was willing to ‘boom it out’. 

Things I appreciated: the actors and costumes definitely caught the flavor of warriors slogging it out in the wet, muddy northern country in the middle ages. A transparent relationship between actor and audience: the show is being performed in broad daylight as it would have been in Shakespeare’s day, so no way to pretend otherwise. Simple, clear storytelling, without a lot of nuance. When Macbeth first appears he walks out onstage, hold his hand out so the rain can fall into it and says, “What a foul and fair day is this.” To which the audience burst into laughter and applause. I was definitely glad not to be a groundling standing in the pit in the rain. 

Staged pretty haphazardly, though I admit the architecture of the stage space (with two enormous columns right in the middle), make it particularly challenging. Because of the shape of the house, the actors were constantly turning to all sides of the house to make sure that people were getting their fair due. Then to the National for Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance. I read in the program, to my surprise, that for a fifty year period in the early 19th Century, Boucicault (pr: Boo-see-ko) was the dominant figure in the English speaking theater on both sides of the Atlantic. He bridged the gap between Congreve, Wycherly and Sheridan (in the 17th Century) to Wilde and Shaw. He was an actor, manager, director, and writer. Born in Dublin, he was famously temperamental and among other things, invented the long run of plays designed to pay larger returns on investment. Nicholas Hytner directed, and the production featured a delicious performance by Fiona Shaw as Lady Gay Spanker, and a completely outrageous and divine performance by Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt Courtly. Classic situation where Sir Harcourt, a fat old dandy in love with himself, agrees to enter into a marriage with a young country girl of 18 in order to benefit from the financial dowry that will come with her. He goes to the country to meet her, while his sexy, and wild young son comes along (unbeknownst to him), and of course the son falls in love with the girl himself. Meanwhile, the hearty and bossy Lady Gay Spanker is engaged to divert Sir Harcourt by trying to get him to seduce her. It was hysterical and beautifully acted. Hytner really has a way of getting the actors to live inside their roles. Though I did think it wasn’t staged very well, which was a bit of a surprise. Like Women Beware Women, there was a flatness, and sometimes awkwardness about the physical staging of the play, as if the sightlines of the Olivier force the director to keep everyone tromping downstage so they can be seen and heard. It was more deft than WBW, but still not Hytner at his best. Loved getting to know the play though, which I think our audience would love. Each performance I’ve seen at the National has been packed. Over the past few years they’ve secured underwriting for their Summer season by a major British Corporation, which enables them to sell all of their tickets for 10 pounds (about $15). There have been lines down the block for the tickets. I would be curious to find out what that has done to the demographics of their audience, and if it has cannibalized their ability to sell full price seats throughout the rest of the season. Monday, May 3 I had planned to take a boat down the Thames to Hampton Court (Henry VIII’s favorite castle), but apparently the published times of departure in the brochure are subject to change daily, so I got there about ten minutes after the boat had taken off. So I opted instead for a trip down the Thames to Kew Gardens. 

It was about two hours in the boat, and the weather was cold, windy and rainy – so I was glad to be inside. 

Kew Gardens is giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinormous. The original 9 acres were donated in 1759 by Alexandra, Princess of Wales, and now is one of the largest and most important Botanical Gardens in the world. 

   

It was beautiful, but a little overwhelming (you could spend three days in the place) – and I admit that given the fact that the wind and rain were making it feel like it was 30 degrees, and I was really not prepared for the weather, I decided to call it a day and head home. May 4 Took the tube to Heathrow airport, got on the plane – slept and read most of the way to JFK. My bag still in London. Oy. I had a one day stopover in NY for a Sunset Boulevard design meeting with Skip Mercier. My bag finally arrived 11:45 the next morning. Things that have stayed with me: in the election discussions – immigration is a huge issue in the UK. As the European Union has become more and more solid, the ease with which citizens can now move between countries is increasing. But it also means that the wealthier countries with jobs, are magnets for migration from the poorer (primarily Eastern European) countries. Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, got himself into a big mess while we were there when he was caught on mic referring to a constituent, who raised the immigrant question, as a ‘racist’. Dialect = class. The Brits still seem obsessed with class and how it affects their lives. And I mentioned to Jamie that I wonder if it is because the way you speak is so much more directly tied to the class you grew up in in the UK. As much as things have changed since Shaw wrote Pygmalion, the connection between the way you sound and where you came from remain particularly heightened in England. UK v. England – I had never gotten clear, but Fin helped me to understand: England, Wales and Scotland each have their own Parliaments, but are all part of Britain. He said to think of Britain as the Federal Government and Wales and Scotland as States within it. I definitely walked away with admiration for English actors, and the amount of classical work they seem to get to do. They have an agility and ease within the material that allows them to be both clear and interesting. And it made me long for the opportunity to produce/direct more classical work. Till next year.