dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2007-02-15 02:53 pm
dramaturgy) wrote2007-02-15 02:53 pm
Wednesday - Whitehall and Happy Days
So yesterday was Valentine's Day. Lacking a Valentine as I was, I saw a Beckett play (YAY) and had some awesome chocolate ice cream. Which was good enough for me. What the hell, right?
So this'll be my last YAY LONDON post before Monday, since I leave for Wales tomorrow at noon, arriving in Haverfordwest at approximately seven PM. After I finish this post, I'm probably going to head down to Sloane Square to see if there are any cancellations for The Seagull. According to my internet it says I have thirty some hours left on my House download and, well. That's just unacceptable.
Anyway.
See how those pigeons attack that poor girl! DO YOU SEE? I was a little jumpy because I was nearly beheaded by a flock of pigeons flying into me, but after that I stood behind John. He's taller than I am, and so the birds would run into him first. *has a plan for everything*
Anyway, so on Tuesday in the National Gallery you can't take pictures of things because they have to regulate the light and blah blah blah curator talk and so yeah. That's why there aren't really any photos for that. Wednesday, we went to the banquet hall at Whitehall, which is the only part left of the palace complex that once stood there - it burned down in 1698, this is the example of Stuart monarchial reign, blah blah blah. Whitehall is also the street that runs from the Houses of Parliament to Trafalgar Square and is where all/most important governmental buildings are.
That is the hall itself. An entrance was built on after the rest of the palace burned down in the 18th century, because otherwise the only way was to get into it by the palace. That first bank of windows is the set that Charles I was led out of onto a scaffold where he was executed the night before his official execution was, right there on a public street.
This is the sign above the entrance. If you can't read it, it says, "
A chandelier in the hall.
The ceiling was painted by Sir Peter Paul Ruben, commissioned by Charles I to extol the virtues of his father (ha). The three center panels show James I as a benevolent, wise ruler and I suppose since he was being paid three thousand pounds he wasn't going to say, "This is a guy who didn't listen to parliament and spent more money than an Orange County housewife!"
The hall itself was designed by Inigo Jones (not Indigo, Inigo as in "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!") who was a Londoner by birth, but spent a lot of time in Italy and was a talented designer. He did a lot of work with stage design, which is actually what I originally know him from. Anyway, the hall is a perfect double cube. It's fifty-five feet wide, fifty-five feet tall, and one hundred and ten feet long. It was originally used for masques that would be designed by Inigo and written by Ben Jonson, but when Charles I had the ceiling paintings put in, he put a stop to the masques, because they relied heavily on spectacle, and there was candlelight, and so on and so forth, and he wasn't going to heighten the risk of fire, and so this mainly became a reception hall.
Ironically, this is the last room of the palace that Charles was led through before he was executed, as you now know.
After we finished there we headed back to the National Gallery for a little bit, and then were let go. There was about an hour and a half until our 5:30 tour backstage of the National Theatre, so I didn't bother going back to the Albert. I bought some presents (for who? Gretchen and dad. :D) and took a nice walk back to the Embankment before crossing the river on a foot bridge to the National Theatre.
I passed the old Scotland Yard building. I thought you might enjoy that, Bill. :)
I'll have so many pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben before I'm through, I'm sure, but this was so pretty with the light and everything that I absolutely couldn't resist.
Turns out that they also light up the London Eye all pink for Valentine's Day, heh. I tried to take a picture of that but it didn't turn out at all since it was dark when I tried. But it was gorgeous.
So, at the National Theatre (Lyttelton) we saw the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days. For those of you not familiar with Samuel Beckett, he is considered an absurdist playwright, which isn't to say absurd in the way we normally think of it as, as in saying, "Today the traffic in downtown Davenport was absolutely absurd." But it stems from a book written by Martin Esslin about these four playwrights (Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, and Genet) who wrote plays that displayed the absurdity of the human condition - it sort of stems from postmodernism and the idea of what matters if we aren't really here for a reason, and it's also connected to existentialism. That's a really shoddy explanation but it's about the best that I can do.
I love Beckett. But reading him is always... it's like pouring water through a colander. Nothing really sticks in my brain and I always feel like I'm missing something unless I'm seeing it. So seeing Beckett rather than reading it is always better for me. I was REALLY excited about this because it was one that I hadn't read before, and we were getting to see it with Fiona Shaw who is an amazing actress. Most people I know probably know her as Petunia Dursley. *g*
I have to say that it was excellent. There was a mad amount of ambiguity at the end, but it was excellent. I can't really describe it. It was a positive Beckett experience, though.
So tomorrow at noon I depart for Wales. I'm excited to see Coram Boy next week, and tour the Globe (!). A bunch of us want to try and see Equus, which from hence forth is going to be known as The Play Where Harry Potter Gets Naked. Yeah, we're a morbidly curious bunch, what do you want to make of it?
So this'll be my last YAY LONDON post before Monday, since I leave for Wales tomorrow at noon, arriving in Haverfordwest at approximately seven PM. After I finish this post, I'm probably going to head down to Sloane Square to see if there are any cancellations for The Seagull. According to my internet it says I have thirty some hours left on my House download and, well. That's just unacceptable.
Anyway.
See how those pigeons attack that poor girl! DO YOU SEE? I was a little jumpy because I was nearly beheaded by a flock of pigeons flying into me, but after that I stood behind John. He's taller than I am, and so the birds would run into him first. *has a plan for everything*
Anyway, so on Tuesday in the National Gallery you can't take pictures of things because they have to regulate the light and blah blah blah curator talk and so yeah. That's why there aren't really any photos for that. Wednesday, we went to the banquet hall at Whitehall, which is the only part left of the palace complex that once stood there - it burned down in 1698, this is the example of Stuart monarchial reign, blah blah blah. Whitehall is also the street that runs from the Houses of Parliament to Trafalgar Square and is where all/most important governmental buildings are.
That is the hall itself. An entrance was built on after the rest of the palace burned down in the 18th century, because otherwise the only way was to get into it by the palace. That first bank of windows is the set that Charles I was led out of onto a scaffold where he was executed the night before his official execution was, right there on a public street.
This is the sign above the entrance. If you can't read it, it says, "
A chandelier in the hall.
The ceiling was painted by Sir Peter Paul Ruben, commissioned by Charles I to extol the virtues of his father (ha). The three center panels show James I as a benevolent, wise ruler and I suppose since he was being paid three thousand pounds he wasn't going to say, "This is a guy who didn't listen to parliament and spent more money than an Orange County housewife!"
The hall itself was designed by Inigo Jones (not Indigo, Inigo as in "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!") who was a Londoner by birth, but spent a lot of time in Italy and was a talented designer. He did a lot of work with stage design, which is actually what I originally know him from. Anyway, the hall is a perfect double cube. It's fifty-five feet wide, fifty-five feet tall, and one hundred and ten feet long. It was originally used for masques that would be designed by Inigo and written by Ben Jonson, but when Charles I had the ceiling paintings put in, he put a stop to the masques, because they relied heavily on spectacle, and there was candlelight, and so on and so forth, and he wasn't going to heighten the risk of fire, and so this mainly became a reception hall.
Ironically, this is the last room of the palace that Charles was led through before he was executed, as you now know.
After we finished there we headed back to the National Gallery for a little bit, and then were let go. There was about an hour and a half until our 5:30 tour backstage of the National Theatre, so I didn't bother going back to the Albert. I bought some presents (for who? Gretchen and dad. :D) and took a nice walk back to the Embankment before crossing the river on a foot bridge to the National Theatre.
I passed the old Scotland Yard building. I thought you might enjoy that, Bill. :)
I'll have so many pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben before I'm through, I'm sure, but this was so pretty with the light and everything that I absolutely couldn't resist.
Turns out that they also light up the London Eye all pink for Valentine's Day, heh. I tried to take a picture of that but it didn't turn out at all since it was dark when I tried. But it was gorgeous.
So, at the National Theatre (Lyttelton) we saw the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days. For those of you not familiar with Samuel Beckett, he is considered an absurdist playwright, which isn't to say absurd in the way we normally think of it as, as in saying, "Today the traffic in downtown Davenport was absolutely absurd." But it stems from a book written by Martin Esslin about these four playwrights (Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, and Genet) who wrote plays that displayed the absurdity of the human condition - it sort of stems from postmodernism and the idea of what matters if we aren't really here for a reason, and it's also connected to existentialism. That's a really shoddy explanation but it's about the best that I can do.
I love Beckett. But reading him is always... it's like pouring water through a colander. Nothing really sticks in my brain and I always feel like I'm missing something unless I'm seeing it. So seeing Beckett rather than reading it is always better for me. I was REALLY excited about this because it was one that I hadn't read before, and we were getting to see it with Fiona Shaw who is an amazing actress. Most people I know probably know her as Petunia Dursley. *g*
I have to say that it was excellent. There was a mad amount of ambiguity at the end, but it was excellent. I can't really describe it. It was a positive Beckett experience, though.
So tomorrow at noon I depart for Wales. I'm excited to see Coram Boy next week, and tour the Globe (!). A bunch of us want to try and see Equus, which from hence forth is going to be known as The Play Where Harry Potter Gets Naked. Yeah, we're a morbidly curious bunch, what do you want to make of it?