I’d thought Saturday to be a slow day for recuperation, but then I got excited to go to the West End area to see Daniel Boys signing his new CD, so the day was on! Rick, Anna, and I left early … we were already going to see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia that night … so we figured to stay all day, ramble around, starting with the signing at Dress Circle on Upper St. Martin’s Lane … but the queue was way too long and I just don’t stand in line for anything. If there’d been the slightest chance that Boys would have looked at me, fallen madly in love, and left with me, I’d have waited hours and hours, but that being too ridiculous to consider, I told Rick and Anna we might as well just head south, grab a prawn mayo from Pret to eat on the steps of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and watch the Saturday madness of Trafalgar Square. And a moment for a chat with Oscar Wilde …
Anna wanted to pop into the National Portrait Gallery shop for some postcards, and I was sad to see that we’d be missing the exhibit there on “Gay Icons” … those would have been fun portraits to see! But our lunch on the church steps was lovely, until Anna, not paying careful enough attention to the aggressive pigeons that stalk Trafalgar Square, found that one large triangle of her cut sandwich bread was the new plaything of the birds, each taking turns throwing the large triangle into the air to break it up, a flock descending to eat the seeds and to carb-load. It was funny to watch, certainly, though anytime that many pigeons get around me I have Hitchcock flashbacks and look for the nearest exit!
We decided to pop into the National Gallery since we were there and needed to kill some time before the play. Truthfully, I’m not a huge fan of art galleries; I feel so completely ignorant in them, and can’t help but think that I’m wasting my time. I want someone I know to be there beside me, to tell me how to read the walls, what to look at, how to see it. I always feel this need to ground my reading of the art; with that, I’m quite happy reading it differently, working against any sort of official interpretation or period-based assessment. Without that grounding, I find all art to be like Jackson Pollack canvases: a lot going on, no idea where to settle my eye, no sense of how to begin. I could just as easily be looking for Waldo in the gallery as anything. I can’t help but feel this is a mark of my low character.
Regardless, this trip, though I was overwhelmed and frustrated by the crowded Saturday gallery, did yield two pleasant surprises. One, I fell somewhat fully in love with Renoir’s “The Umbrellas” … the movement of the piece, following from the bright child at the bottom to the apex at the top right, the umbrellas are exquisite; I found myself watching them, moving with them … the blues so exquisite. Then, I stumbled upon “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” by Paul Delaroche …. I couldn’t move for 20 minutes. The painting is enormous, too large to fit on the wall in any home I could ever own, done in lights and brushstrokes that seem to me like the Dutch Masters, though I couldn’t possibly tell you why I think that. The image of Lady Jane, blindfolded, inches away from the wood block on which the axe would sever her head from her body … the ladies in waiting there to watch, one already fainted and crumpled on the ground, the other wailing upon the back wall, the strange determination of the man guiding Lady Jane to her death, and the strange dark look of empathy on the executioner’s face. And Lady Jane, all in an ethereal silver-white dress, her arms awkwardly jutting from her body, looking for something to grab, something to steady her, fingers sticking out as though desperate to touch something firm, something exact, to find comfort or assurance. The whole tableau gruesome and alarming and appealing and amazing, light in dark, dark around light, colors muted and explosive in an orgy of trembling. It makes me want to know something about art.
The evening culminated for me, however, in the trip to Arcadia at the Duke of York theatre on St. Martin’s Lane. In some ways, this feels like the most perfect of London trips: in the span of one week, I’ll have attended genius productions of the last two plays I performed in, Arcadia and Peter Pan (in a few days).
I had looked forward to seeing Arcadia for months, since the moment I read that it would be in London while we were there, to see again my favorite Stoppard play, one I had performed in myself back in my ‘theater days’ … As I watched, from the opening with Thomasina and Septimus’s discussion of carnal embrace, all the way through, I remembered so many moments of our own rehearsals and performances at Georgia Southern in the summer of 1999 — ten years ago exctly — and Amy Lovin as Hannah, Amy as Hermoine, David, all the rest — so much fun that summer —and, of course, missing Patti … Stoppard’s play remains, for me, a brilliant look at hwat we know and don’t — at the way we seek so aggressively (and arrogantly) for knowledge, to learn and to know, and the sturggle of methodology — the how we know.
I left that play on a high that I experience rarely … I love almost all plays, musicals, theatre, but there are those that move more fully or completely, or which raise questions that keep me thinking for days … I was lucky to see such a moving Arcadia, and even more fortunate that so many of our students chose to go on their own to see it after Rick and I recommended it in class.
Before I’d left Atlanta, I had pretty much read 
And it’s infinitely better on several levels than Lee Bantle’s 
The Tate was tremendous fun this year as the first floor was half-filled with a sort of rustic playground, including some balance beams and tight ropes, some inclines for climbing, and a series of closet-looking structures for climbing by placing the back against one side the feet against the other and inching up. The best, however, was this enormous ball that rolled around on sand and made a cool sound, sort of like popping bubble-wrap, and near it this cylinder that would fit two or three people and would roll back and forth.
As You Like It had been so lovely, we were all quite eager to see 
My first fear for the production came almost immediately, however, as so many of Mr. Darling’s lines were being cut or rewritten. Where was his famous “A little less noise there!”? I thought to myself, “This won’t work when Peter says the same line two acts later!” (and then even more shocking to see that Peter had lost that line as well!!) It was the loss of the poetry that affronts — these lines were, many of them, so tragically stiff or simple — at times, it seemed the director could not fix his gaze on any particular audience: this scene cut as a problem for contemporary children to understand, this one left in, Tiger Lily reconceived as a sex kitten and Tinker Bell represented on stage a tall post-goth pixie, but then poetic lines of complexity omitted … some things changed for young children, then others added for adolescents or adults … just strange, to me, as the original play works just fine “as is” …
