Museums and Pubs and Plays, Oh My!

The last two days have certainly been cultural ones! Yesterday, I went with Chanel and Olivia to the Victoria and Albert Museum down the road. One of my favorite parts of London is that most of the museums are free! Though we were there about two hours before succumbing to hunger, we only got about halfway through the museum! And if we'd read absolutely everything, we probably wouldn't have made it past the first floor! That place is huge and full of absolutely everything you can think of. Well maybe not everything, but the collection is very well ranged. I particularly enjoyed the medieval sections. It never ceases to amaze me how intricate and beautiful their art was. I can't even imagine creating most of it with modern tools!

We thought we'd join the collection

Don't I look fabulous in Victorian dress? 

I also really enjoyed just how many tea pots from around the world were featured. I wanted to take about half of them home and now really want to learn how to properly brew tea, and not just with tea bags! I'll get on that. It's a good excuse to buy some of the pretty tea pots I've seen online. 

After a relaxing late afternoon, I decided I had enough energy to go out with some of the others in my group and braved a club/bar called O'Neil's for a few hours. Though I still find clubs too loud and crowded, I managed to have a good time! 

Despite being exhausted the next day, I managed to be on time for my lunch date today! I found my way through the tube by myself for the first time to meet an old friend from the US for lunch. We met at a place that had caught my eye on our bus tour - the Hung Drawn and Quartered! The conversation was excellent and the food as good! I had my first traditional meat pie in a pub and look forward to eating it again! 

Suri and her guinea fowl pie!

I am very pleased that restaurants here provide vinegar for your chips (we'd know them as french fries) because I adore them served like that but you don't often find it in the US!

Tonight climaxed with a trip to West End! Everyone in our British Life and Cultures class attended a performance either last week or tonight of 39 Steps. Going into it, I didn't really know much of anything about the play, so I had no idea what to expect. Our group was scattered throughout the rather small theater, and I wound up in row C, fairly near the center so I was very excited about my seat. Since I didn't know anything about the play, I made friends with the two people sitting behind me to ask them. They were a mother and daughter all the way from Australia. The daughter had just finished a high school exchange program in Germany and they were traveling briefly on their way home. 

My conversation with the daughter reveled that she was familiar with some of the places I'd seen in Sydney when I was there with People to People and we had a lovely conversation about Australia in general. Apparently it's REALLY hot there right now, approximately 40 degrees Celsius (she wanted to know why Americans wouldn't use Metric and I sadly didn't have an answer). Also, it is, in fact, true that everything in Australia wants to kill you. Everything is poisonous. I also picked up the tidbit that when they rate the risk of fire danger, the lowest possible score is medium! Also, after some severe fires a few years ago, they needed something worse than "high risk" and invented CATASTROPHIC! Only in Australia, right? 

Anyway, after chatting, I had also learned that I was expecting a comedy based on a 1915 spy novel and an Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name. It was a 4 actor show, with these 4 actors playing every role. So when the lights dimmed, I was already excited. 

The show turned out to follow a 37 year old man named Richard who runs into a lovely mysterious woman named Annabella at a rather strange play. She fires a gun in the theater and gets him to take her back to his apartment where she reveals that she is a secret agent and that important knowledge is about to leave the country. Shortly after, she is killed, leaving Richard a murder suspect. I don't want to give any spoilers, so instead we're going to move onto the unique elements of the play. 

Because there were only four actors in the play and one of them constantly playing Richard, the others were left playing every other character! This required fantastic comedic timing and physical acting on their parts. I was insanely impressed with all of them being able to transform into an entirely different characters with entirely different mannerisms instantly. In addition, they pulled off some of the most impressive quick changes ever - often in only a few seconds. I'm sure there was layering involved but that doesn't make it any less impressive. I know I couldn't even begin to do it! One of my favorite bits was when the two male character actors were each playing several characters in the same scene and portrayed it by switching between two or three hats in rapid succession. It worked very well and was also absolutely hilarious! 

In addition, I was very impressed by the minimalistic sets used throughout the play. With a few basic props, sound effects, lights, a fog machine, and fantastic acting, the production managed to convey everything from a living room to a moving train. Despite the minimal sets, you totally believed it in the moment! As a former techie, I am insanely impressed by the timing and complexity of each of their cues! 

Overall, the play was very dry, British humor that reminded me very much of Monty Python. Between that and the Hitchcock references they kept slipping in, I couldn't stop laughing! They put a fantastic spin on the tropes of the thriller genre and turned them into fantastic comedy. The only disappointment I had was at the end, they had a perfect opportunity to say "it's just a flesh wound" and didn't take it!