London May 20

Went out for the day with my friend from fifth grade, Tim. As we left our hotel they were putting up an elaborate floral arrangement around the hotel entrance.

We went on a walking tour of sites associated with the lives and works of Dickens and Shakespeare. Our guide was an actor who did some dramatic recitations of passages from both authors. Along the way we stopped at half a dozen pretty little or medium-sized parks or nooks or squares or other public spaces, most with benches and gardens. We passed by a dozen more. Most have been there since medieval times or before, others were cleared by the Great Fire of 1666 or the Blitz of 1941.

I annoyed the guide by asking her questions she couldn’t answer about real life locations from Bleak House – the street crossing swept by the orphan Jo, the cemetery where a character (no spoiler) died of grief and shame.  Then I embarrassed her by correcting (privately) her error of claiming that a speech by Thomas More was a response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which as every schoolchild knows happened 150 years after More’s death and almost a century after Shakespeare’s. 

After the tour Tim and I returned to a couple sites that our guide had mentioned. One, St. Bartholomew’s church, is so iconic that it has been used in a lot of movies, including Shakepeare in Love and The Great Muppet Caper. Here’s how it has looked since 1123, from Google images:

But the church was hosting a “Church of Design” event. According to the event website, “the 900-year old medieval church will provide a breathtaking backdrop for cutting-edge contemporary design products covering all types of interior design.” They had chopped the nave and choir into display booths, which rather obscenely obliterated any sense of peace or divinity.

In the evening we went to Romeo and Juliet at the Globe, the recreation of Shakespeare’s 16th century theater on the South Bank of Thames. They set the production in the Amercan Wild West for no reason that Tim or I could discern — Wild West set and costumes, guns instead of swords, an occasional yeehaw, some sort of square dancing, but it was kind of incongruous with the Italian names for peope and places. The actors were not wearing microphones so they needed to project their voices, as all actors had to do from ancient times until very recently.  Requires a very different skill than with a mic.  When they faced away it was sometimes hard to hear but otherwise they  conveyed even quiet emotions well. Acting overall was pretty good except for Romeo, which seems to be a common problem in the productions I have seen. Maybe it’s just really difficult to convey the love at first sight emotions in the text. But this Romeo also seemed to rush his lines, losing the rhythm and making it hard to understand. Juliet and the Friar were the standouts.  But they oddly truncated the ending, taking out the Friar’s recap to the Prince and the parents of what just happened, the grief of the parents, and most importantly the reconciliation of the families.  This made the ending pretty abruptly, and also broke the promise made in the prologue.

A lot of students in the groundlings including three 12 year old I watched occasionally who were restless through the beginning but rapt at the end.