Yes, we are still here.

Today was kind of a lazy day as well (I know I'm slacking, but what can I say?). We didn't have class or anything scheduled for this morning and so Jason and I decided that we would go to a shop we had heard about called Primark. For those who have never been to Primark, it is amazing. It is essentially a large department store with secondhand store prices. So there were t-shirts for a pound, button ups for 3 pounds, shoes for 2-5, I could have bought a full suit for under 20 pounds throw in some real leather shoes and we're up to 35 pounds. It was wonderful. The only issue is that I have a limited amount of room and weight left in my check bag for when I return home. I'm already starting to think about which of the clothes I brought from home I will leave here to free up some space. But due to this limited capacity I actually didn't buy that many things. I did get a couple shirts to make me look more European (although that's not always good since we have a hard time determining whether a guy is European or gay...).

After Primark Jason and I realized that we needed to get to the Tricycle theater and fast. We had a matinee that started at 2:00 and from what the teacher was saying we wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to get there. We ran into two problems: the directions that the teacher had printed off for us started from our flat, which we were not at, and our helpful roommate Allan had told us which bus we needed to take from Primark... but we had forgotten what number he said. So, it was an adventure. Actually it mostly involved us reading a map. But since we have been mostly using the tube system, we really didn't know how to read the bus maps.

Long story short, we made it. Actually we made it before most of the class did, including the two teachers.

The Tricycle is a pretty neat theatre. Here is its entrance:

They had made a mobile out of three bicycle wheels (granted I guess that would be a tricycle then). And they had a magical corridor of mirrors.


Here's Jason pointing into the worlds of eternity.

Then there was Twelfth Night. This was quite the interesting interpretation of the classic Shakespearean play. It was set in a recording studio, or something. There was no set, and actually no real setting for the play at all. It looked like you had stumbled into a rock concert with seats for the audience. Once the play got going it all made sense.

The show was developed by a group called "Filter" that focuses on the merging of musicians, actors, directors, and all sorts of theatre makers. The idea behind their shows is that they find the highs and the lows in the emotion of the script and then they use music to help tell that story. So, for example, when the Duke Orsino is being a whiny love-sick puppy, it was like a poetry reading in a coffee house with heavy bass and a brush on the snare with Orsino quoting his lines like a beatnik. When Malvolio, the "bad guy" of the show is contemplating how awesome it would be to be a count, it is to the tune of a hard rock song (which he played the air guitar on). And so on.

I loved it. I feel that it worked almost every scene that it was included in. Overall the show was just fun. It was ridiculous and self referential (like Viola speaking to an FM radio which answered her back instead of a messenger). But I think overall my favorite part was the interplay between the two drunk revelers Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew.

The show was set in modern times, everyone was wearing the type of clothing you would expect them to be in on the street. That is, except for Sir Toby. His first entrance, he stumbles in drunk at the back of the stage in full Elizabethan clothing, doublet, tights, frilly starched collar, and starts quoting the "to be or not to be" quote from Hamlet. He then polishes off a beer and wanders off the other side of the stage. The rest of the cast then resumed the play where they had left off.

The best scene, however, had absolutely nothing to do with progressing the plot. Sir Toby wakes up from being passed out on the floor, and in his drunken revelry starts whisper/drunk singing a song about love, then Sir Andrew (also drunk) comes and joins him in his singing. Sir Andrew is wearing this amazing hat with strips of velcro all over it and three squishy balls stuck to the velcro. As the scene goes on, chaos reigns. Sir Toby gets the band to start playing along with him and sings at the top of his lungs, Sir Andrew discovers the balls stuck to his head and has the audience try to throw them at him to get them to stick, then they pulled an audience member up and had him wear a velcro hat, then they started pulling audience members up to start dancing with them, then my professor (of his own volition) got on stage and started dancing (and when returning to his seat climbed the scaffolding the seats were on and accidentally broke a light), and then Sir Andrew ran to the back of the audience to the door and shouted "Pizza!" at which point he started passing two pizza boxes through the audience (I didn't get any).

The scene was nuts, but so fun.

I really loved this show. It was all around a good time. Not the best acting in the world, maybe not even the best interpretation, but it was a side of the show that I had not considered before and it was extremely fun, and yet at moments very poignant as well.

One character that is always rather troubling is Malvolio. He is the bad guy, but in reading the script, and in most productions you watch, he gets way more than he deserves. This show handled it in a very interesting way. They made him evil. Very evil. He started strangling the clown.

Then there is the famous scene where Sir Toby tricks Malvolio into thinking that to woo a lady he must dress himself in a ridiculous fashion (Toby fakes a letter from the lady saying that she prefers a man in yellow stockings who is cross gartered). This production was grotesquely hilarious. Malvolio (played by a man with a bit of a gut) stripped down to thigh high yellow socks and yellow booty shorts... and that's it. He then danced around the stage to his hard rock song until he was discovered by his lady (shocked to say the least) and the play continued.

Now if we just left it there, it wouldn't have been too much and it would have been deserved (he is a mean guy). But there is one more scene.

Because of his antics, the lady puts Malvolio under the care of Sir Toby, who hates him. Sir Toby and the clown, Touchstone, then put Malvolio in a lightless prison with duct tape around his wrists providing him with little food and torturing him with constant noise and talking. It is a brutal scene, and this production left the brutality in it. They didn't try to soften it at all.

So I find it interesting that I could have so much fun during one raucous scene and feel like a jerk for siding with the guy who ended up torturing a man in another scene. Good show.

I know this post is rather long, but the one other thing that we did today was get some great middle-eastern food. The Tricycle theater is located, oddly enough, in the middle of the middle-eastern immigrant community. I'm not sure what you would call it, "Little Lebanon"? Anyhow, it was quite good and really cheap.

Tonight we chose not to see another show. We were all tired and just needed some rest. Tomorrow we are going to Kew Gardens, so expect lots of pictures... to be on my camera at least. After that we will probably go see a show. I'm shooting for 6/6 this week.

Hooray!