Interesting trip to the National Maritime Museum and the Globe Theater on Thursday--first, we were treated to an hour-and-a-half of traffic stoppage on the M11, making us very late to the NMM. However, Richard Dunn and Gillian Hutchinson took time out of their busy schedules (and, I suspect, their lunch hours) to present their lectures anyway. Though we were in a low-security part of the museum, and didn't see the instruments and maps that we normally see, the presentations were excellent and the students were interested.
We'd intended to drop the students at the Embankment and let them make their various ways through London to the hostels that some of them planned to stay in over the weekend. However, with the time crunch, we dropped them at the South Bank and essentially guarded their luggage at the Globe until curtain time. Given the size of some of the student bags, it was probably technically not allowed for them to take the bags into the theater (but there was no cloakroom either). But they weren't stopped or forced to leave.
The performance was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a parallel one to last year, but much different. Last year's performance tried for more emotional tension and had more special effects. This one used few special effects and a very small cast, doubling and even tripling the parts. Some of the doublings were standard: Theseus/Hippolyta/Oberon/Titania, Philostrate/Puck; others less so (doubling the mechanicals and the lovers).
The performance was set in a sexy version of the 1920's, which fit at some level, given the general modernist and yet Freudian mood of the period. Puck, played by a woman, was especially--um, how do I say this?--seductive. She did, however, use the kewpie-doll flapper voice for both her rude mechanical character (Snout, the lion), and Puck.
I figure I'll just post a couple of pictures of us in the audience, since we weren't supposed to take pics of the performance . . .
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