What Was Up With the Flying Monkeys?

Day 8

Class with George. They all sort of run together. I think this is the second part to his lecture. I’m trying/not trying to think about this paper we have to write soon. Not excited.

After class, a few of us head to a terrifying yet magical place called Primark. Located on the aforementioned Oxford Street, this place is a department store… but the only way to describe it is to say imagine Black Friday at the mall. Then multiply the amount of people by 5 and exponentially raise the amount of crazy. I fight my way through yelling women and purchase 3 camis for a pound each. Yes. A pound. And sunglasses, for a pound. And tights for 2 pounds. Are you getting the idea? This place is crazy intense. But I love it and have to come back.

At 5:30, we meet as a group at the National Theatre where we saw London Assurance for a tour of the facility. Katie accurately dubs it “the Disneyland of theatre” and I couldn’t agree more. The place has three theatres of varying sizes and runs it’s shows on a repertory system meaning that each theatre has about 3 shows running in it at one time. “How do they do that?” you may ask. Well, in one of the theatres, there is an L shape design so the set for one of the shows pushes in one piece to a storage unit to the left of the stage, another set pushes into a unit behind the stage, and another set is kept in the ridiculously high fly system. But once the wagon is rolled onto the stage for the rolling sets, you can’t tell because the floor is lowered down so that it looks like it is built directly onto the floor. (If all of this means nothing to you, just skip it. If you are drooling by this point, keep reading.) There are various practice rooms with identical dimensions to the 3 stages so that actors can very easily and quickly transfer their work to the actual stage. They have a set construction room and a painting room and a costume room and a props room and a…..

I would give anything to work in this place. They run on a 54 MILLION POUND budget (81 million dollars). And 35% of that comes from the government. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

On the balcony of the National Theatre before the show.

After the tour we see Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women which leaves much to be desired. While the acting was decent, the plot was dry, the language heavy, and the direction a little weak. The last scene however, in which all of the dialogue is cut and about 12 deaths occur in the span of five minutes while the entire stage is spinning and there are black angels crawling all over the set was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. If the show had had that sort of feel throughout, I might not have almost fallen asleep at multiple points during the 3 hours.

LONDON, WHAT?

Dear London. I understand that you lack rolling hills. But must you create your own by the sidewalks? WHAT?