Loose in London to weary in Keswick (Writing evening of 28 Apr 04 and next morning)

Loose in London to weary in Keswick (Writing evening of 28 Apr 04 and next morning)

 

From Westminster Bridge, we walked on along the south side of the Thames.  We walked by the London Eye – a huge Ferris wheel run by British Airways.  Thought about taking a ride, but the day was fairly hazy, and I’d heard it was only worthwhile on a really clear day. 

 

We continued on past the national theatre and OXO tower to the Tate Modern.  This had topped Mom’s list of London activities.  I’m an out and out modern art philistine, but even I could appreciate how well the former power plant had been made over into a gallery.  While I didn’t care much for most of the art displayed, it was all presented well in pleasant spaces.  There were plenty of opportunities to take advantage of great views of the rest of London.  At first, it seemed like a shame that the enormous central space (The Turbine Room) was between shows, but then we noticed there were museum staff busily assembling a sculpture.  By the time we left, they had put together enough to give a sense of a black metal spider with a rose for its head and an open work metal basket hanging from below its body.  We also saw a flat full of polished stone eggs but never figured out how they might fit in to the work.  If I get back to London before journey’s end, I will try to get back to the Tate and find out what it is.

 

The Tate was also flowing over with school children.  We walked by a cluster of them in a room full of Warhols.  One young woman was spinning off a fatuous interpretation of a diptych of Marilyn Monroe silk screens.  Mom was strongly inclined to go into teacher mode and set the young woman straight, but restrained herself.

 

From the Tate Modern we headed to the Globe.  We had a quick bite in the café (by this time, we had walked five and a half miles and were quite hungry.)  Ready for more action, we bought tickets for the tour then poked around the small museum there until tour time.  The museum is partly about Shakespeare but mostly about Sam Wannamaker, the American actor who did most of the fundraising around the reconstitution of the Globe.  He did manage to create a great space and a good group of people running an education program around it. 

 

Our tour guide was fabulous.  She mixed up stories of Shakespeare’s day with theatrical absurdities and mishaps involved in the new Globe’s life so far.  While she was speaking to us, we were sitting in the gallery of the theater.  A set decorator was carefully dabbing paint on a bed that would be part of the set for Romeo and Juliet.  At one point, someone who must have been the technical director came on stage with a long torch with a massive flame on it.  He was superintended by a fire marshal.  The tour guide explained that this was work to secure their open flame license – to allow them to include the torch in the crypt scene.  The Globe claims (fairly credibly) to be the first wooden, thatch roofed building built in London since the great fire, so there’s a lot of care with anything that might put a match to it.  As we walked away, a group of actors came on stage to start working swordplay with some fight choreographers.  Lots of evidence that this is a working theater.

 

We walked back up the Thames and crossed over to the north bank into The City on the millennium bridge.  The views up and down the river from the bridge are terrific, and it’s wonderful to be crossing without car traffic.  Had a nice visit at the museum of London.  There are tons of London memorabilia, going back to well before there was a London, but the star of the place is a group of Victorian shop fronts that are completely reconstructed. 

 

Also saw a special exhibit on London in the 1920’s.  The strangest thing was an exhibit on an invented religion the name of which escapes me, but its initials were KK.  It involved a lot of wearing weird costumes most including complex graphic badges.  The fellow in charge wore an outfit that included a white hood.  I think their main tenet of belief was that large sums of money should be given to the fellow in charge.  The rest of the exhibit had fabulous twenties fashions and graphic design including costumes of the ballet russe similar to some Sara and her mother and I saw at the Baltimore Museum of Art a little while ago.

 

It was drawing in for evening and threatening to rain, so we took the tube from Saint Pauls back to Queensway.  Tried to buy a phone again, this time succeeding.  Walked back to the hotel just as it was starting to rain.

 

We looked through Time Out London for show ideas.  I pushed for Masks and Faces, a rarely produced comedy from the middle of the 19th century.  We took a cab to the Finborough Theatre – a pub theatre south west of Earls Court.  I maintain that it would have been a wonderful show, but the short, furious rain we rode our cab through flooded the theatre and cancelled the show.  I was at the bar ordering drinks when a surprisingly peaceful man popped out of the theater door and said “If you’re hear to see Masks and Faces, I’m sorry to say the performance is cancelled.  We’ve had a terrible flood, and if you don’t believe me you can come and look for yourself.”  I didn’t take him up on the offer, but as we finished our drinks I could see through the door where water was streaming out of a light fixture and running down the stairs.  Sara might be able to correct me, but in all my years of several show a week play going, I think this was the first fully cancelled performance I ever showed up for. 

 

(Continued)