Nicole schreibt...

What an odd but ultimately rewarding trip experience this was. For a host of reasons I ended up with a very unusual schedule for this trip which would start with a late flight to London and last almost a week. Since the option to stay in a private home for free fell through, I needed cheap accommodation with free wifi instead of my usual Travelodge haunts, so I opted to try AirBnB for the first time and got a room in a private house off Brick Lane in the East End. Which turned out to be pretty much perfect, a few minutes' walk from Aldgate East tube and a comfy room on the ground floor close to kitchen and loo, with other guests upstairs. I arrived by 8pm after a beautiful flight over "London by night" (something I have not seen before because I always fly earlier) and there was little to do but chill and sleep.
Even Thursday still felt "on hold" as I spent the daytime indoors working with just one trip to the nearest Tesco before setting out for Islington in the late afternoon to first meet a friend for dinner and then the Doctor for going Psycho. Well, the musical adaptation of cult novel American Psycho at the Almeida starring ex-Doctor Who Matt Smith with music by Duncan Sheik whose score for Spring Awakening I have always loved. It was an odd little show, the violence of the book that had already been turned down for the movie, turned down further and 80's style synthesizer music which I admittedly quite liked, being a child of the 80's. It's hard to feel anything for anyone in that vapid Wall Street yuppie world and if there was any emotion it was mostly just sadness that things haven't changed one bit there or anywhere in that world of high finance. Matt Smith did a decent job as Patrick Bateman, even though he wasn't the world's best singer and not quite as smooth as Christian Bale in the movie. It certainly deserves to transfer and be rewarded for being quirky, odd and different and thus unlike those lackluster "tourist dollar conceptions" of the Viva Forever-ilk.

Friday morning was spent with a few hours' working again before the lure of the West End became too great and I headed out for lunch and my favorite shops. Since the prospect of so many hot guys on stage this January had melted my brain, I had double-booked myself for this day and had tickets for both American Psycho and Mojo and had luckily found another theatre lover who wanted the Psycho ticket (ever since Matt Smith was announced love nor money could find you a ticket at the tiny Almeida). We met up at the Shaftesbury Theatre and went for a coffee nearby as it's always nice to talk theatre with other people, then parted ways to move on with our evenings and lives. I went down to the Harold Pinter Theatre(which I still think of as 'the Comedy' really) to meet another lovely person who I had first met through work, a young German lady living in London with a big crush on Rupert Grint (aka Ron Weasley from Harry Potter).

After dinner at the kitschy-cute Muriel's Kitchen in Leicester Square we were off to see Mojo which I had been keen on both for its all-star cast and for being written by Jez Butterworth whose "Jerusalem" has been one of my best theatre experiences ever. Mojo is the tale of a bunch of weirdo's in Soho's fledgling rock'n'roll scene of the 50's and its mix of violence and chattiness mostly reminded me of gangster movies like Lock, Stock and Two smoking Barrels (whatever happened to Guy Ritchie anyway?).
Main attraction in the cast for me was Ben Whishaw (again!), but of course it was also interesting to see Rupert Grint make his West End debut, plus Colin "Merlin" Morgan, Brendan "Bates the Butler" Coyle and Daniel Mays, who I did not know but who also has an impressive CV of theatre, film and TV work. And of course Tom Rhys Harries whose only contribution is to spend the last 15 minutes of the show hanging upside down from the ceiling.

It's impossible to single someone out as the cast was universally great - not that I had expected anything different. Whishaw gave what's termed an "award-winning performance" as the ever-so-slightly unhinged and creepy Baby and I was really impressed by Colin Morgan's transformation from geeky family TV wizard to utterly creepy Soho goon. The transformation was less convincing with the other two stars, as Grint still had a lot of wide-eyed scared Ron Weasley about him and when Brendan Coyle came on stage I was really just thinking "Uh oh, here comes Bates". Ah well, it still was a great evening out. My friend wanted to meet Grint afterwards, so we hung around the "emergency exit" which was a second stage door and which she claimed was the place to meet him. I did wander to the official stage door a couple of times, as much to keep warm in the pouring rain as to see what was happening there. And had a lucky moment when I caught Ben Whishaw there. So ironically I've met him twice now (and he's still adorably huggy and cute) while having failed to meet so many others - which included Grint, who just didn't turn up and when the stage door guy locked up and the theatre was dark, my friend finally conceded defeat and I could get out of the rain into the tube.
Saturday was my day off from social obligations and I headed into town just in time for the shops opening at 10am. The last couple of trips there had never really been time for a good stroll around my favorite shops and now with the January sales on it was even more tempting and I did reach that nice point where I felt that I had found some good stuff and reached the limit of what I wanted to spend. Then it was time for the matinee, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical "Stephen Ward" about the Profumo affair in the 60's and the man who had been made the scapegoat. I hadn't known anything about the whole thing before the musical came out and while I have enjoyed the CD already, the show itself left me rather cold. Stephen Ward was a "society osteopath" who treated the rich and famous and loved to party. But it was hard to feel any sympathy for a middle-aged party animal who dallies with teenage girls (even if it supposedly remained non-sexual) and I had rather heard more about the two girls at the heart of the story - Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies - where they came from, what motivated them, how they felt about it all as the story progressed. Instead we got a lot of dull "explanation" songs and the drawn-out court case against Ward while the biggest number was reserved for the wife of Profumo who we have hardly met before and thus don't care about either, never mind that personally I'm goddamn tired of these cliché-ridden stand-by-your-man-songs in which a woman whinges she knows the man is no good but she luuuurves him so and will stick by him - a good writer might have turned this song into a song about her disgust with high society and sleazy guys or even better, given the song to one of the girls who get to sing far too little. The cast was good but while Alexander Hanson certainly carried the show on his shoulders as Stephen Ward, I just couldn't care for the character himself. Nor for Christine Keeler (Charlotte Spencer) who just came across like a bitch. I did like Charlotte Blackledge as Mandy Rice-Davies, who seemed to be the nicer and more conscientious of the pair but ultimately she had very little to do or sing. Overall I think there's definitely a good show in this - the material is fascinating and ALW can still write wonderful tunes (I love the duet "This side of the sky"), but the book lets it down and it really needs some extensive rewrites to grip the audience I think.
From the Aldwych Theatre I wandered along the Strand and through Covent Garden (by way of a cute cupcake shop) to the Noel Coward Theatre for an evening of Shakespeare with dashing Jude Law as Henry V. Now I had actually seen Jude Law before when he did Hamlet a few years ago but between being tired and having a crappy seat at the far end of a row, I spent half that performance asleep. Not so this time with a perfect seat in the middle stalls and a rather action-laden plot with battles and plenty of shouting - and Law giving a far more energetic performance. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I ended up joining the huge throng at the stage door afterwards to wait for him and have him sign my programme. His hair may be going but he is still a really handsome fellow indeed.
Normally I fly home on Sunday when the theatres are closed anyway, but with my schedule being so loaded anyway and the prospect of being able to see a captioned performance of Shakespeare, I decided to extend my stay for another two days. This enabled me to daytrip out to Watford to spend Sunday with a friend in "the countryside" with a lovely long lunch at a country pub - but alas no long walk since it was pissing it down all day. Amusingly we passed through Kings Langley, which announced recently it would call itself Kings Landing in February to mark the DVD of the third season of Game of Thrones coming out on TV (but sadly nothing of that was on display yet). With the weather too bad for anything outdoorsy, we went to see muchly praised drama "12 Years a Slave" at the local multiplex instead before I returned into London for an early night in.
Leaving Monday evening to be the grand finale of this trip with "Coriolanus" at the Donmar Warehouse, currently the hottest ticket in town thanks to Tom "Loki" Hiddleston in the lead. It was definitely much easier for me to follow Shakespeare with the captions on - which didn't stop the play from dragging nonetheless. But at least we got to see a bare-chested Hiddleston taking an on-stage shower and overall very fine acting all around by a starry cast that also included Mark Gatiss from "Sherlock" as Menenius, dishy Hadley Fraser (so far seen in musicals) as Aufidius, blonde Barbie doll Birgitte Hjort Sørensen from "Borgen" as Virgilia and Alfred Enoch (Dean Thomas from the "Harry Potter" movies) as Titus Lartius, as well as Deborah Findlay as Volumnia - who I was certainl I had also seen in something (must have been "Cranford"). Her voice grated horribly on me during Volumnia's last big plea with Coriolanus to spare Rome but that was the only niggle in an otherwise great evening.

While the captioned performance of Shakespeare was definitely worth staying until Monday for, I did feel like the trip was dragging a little and I realized that I prefer my "whirlwind tours" of three days with a mix of theatre, shopping and dining, plus perhaps some sightseeing to this mix of "daily work grind" and "being in London" - so I'll be back on my usual schedules from now on. Bring on spring!