The Theatre

These past few days have been the most theatrical yet. On Thursday I went with my flatmates to Shunt, a club that's built into the cavernous tunnels surrounding London Bridge tube station. It was exactly the sort of thing that I would enjoy; the entire place was Soviet-themed, and there were people running around finding clues and announcing them into telephones scattered around the room and weird dance music and some guy in tights and a fanny pack. I'll be back at some point, although hopefully with some idea of what was going on.

Then we went traveling! First we went to Warwick Castle, built by William the Conquerer but currently under the ownership of Madame Tussaud's wax museum. You could tell. My favorite part was when we went to go see a trebuchet launching where the 'trebuchet master' described it as a 'giant, monstrous seesaw' and emphasized repeatedly for a good twenty minutes the amount of toil and danger that trebuchet engineers had to face every day! There were also a lot of really, really lame wax people. Beautiful views though.

We went from Warwick to Stratford, which at first glance is a lot like Disneyland for a certain subset of people, namely the subset that's obsessed with Shakespeare. Basically I loved it. I had some incredible Thai food in a reasonably-priced while 2 Michelin starred restaurant, and then saw a production of Hamlet featuring David Tennant, Patrick Stewart and this guy from Star Wars that was probably the best theatrical production I have ever seen. Pretty perfect. The next day we saw a much more terrible production of the Merchant of Venice which basically amounted to a recital of the script without any meaningful interpretation. And then we went home!

It's worth noting that the entire town of Stratford is completely rife with Shakespeare references, with a bunch of rentable boats with female character names (Juliet, Viola, Beatrice), restaurants called Iago, Othello, Cordelia, an As You Like It Café, et cetera. Oh, and the gem of a toy store in the picture above.

Yesterday we saw a contemporary production of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author that was probably the most clever play I've ever seen. I'm not sure if I liked it, but I did like that it starred Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars (sci fi seems to be the second theme of the week) and referenced Hamlet quite a bit, at one point specifically referring to the production I had seen two days previously. I can't even begin to describe what the performance was about, but there was one scene in which the writers of the play explained the whole story to a producer and then were horribly murdered by one of the characters. The whole thing sort of reminded me of a much more self-referential At Swim-Two-Birds.

It's cold and rainy out today. I should probably start getting used to that.