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 Current Reviews Return to previous page Victor K Heyman Dec 99
It is Friday now and we have been in London about 36 hours. We took off from DC Wednesday around 11pm in a British Airways 777. It is an enormous plane, completely packed -- and the most comfortable in coach we've ever flown. The last time over we went Business Class (on frequent flyer points, of course) and loved it so much that we swore we'd never go back to steerage. But when British Airways offered coach seats at $99 each way, we said to ourselves "how bad can it be for 7 hours or so?" Well, if we could take a 777 run by the British, configured 3-3-3, we would take it every time. We even slept a bit coming over -- Reba planned ahead and got eye shades and eye plugs. At Heathrow we had a choice -- an expensive (12 pounds each) fast-train run to Paddington Station taking 20 minutes, or a slow Underground run taking an hour for 2 pounds each. We chose the cheaper way because we anticipated trouble trying to check in at 10am. Our first stop (complete still with baggage) was at Leicester Square to raid the half price ticket booth. The lines are never long here and it is so easy to deal with them. So we picked Comic Potential for the afternoon matinee and A Saint She Ain't for last night. We wanted light shows for our first day and got them. Comic Potential is Alan Ayckbourn's 53rd play. It is set in the future when TV actors have been replaced by actoids, and scripts have been replaced by programmers, directors, and corporate overseers. Naturally, we have a corporate Wicked Witch of the West, a drunken bully of a Director, a couple of ill-programmed actoids, and a couple of lesbian programmers who try to hold things together. Then comes the nephew of the top corporate mogul, who wants to learn directing and ends up falling in love with an actoid who along the way has developed its own sense of humor. This can of corn successfully resolves itself, leaving us satisfied that boy can meet Actoid, and Actoid can bring down Wicked Witch, spruce up the Drunken Director, and help Sonny grow up. We enjoyed this cream puff, but it is not great theatre and requires very good actors to be successful -- and the actors we saw were very much up to the task. A Saint She A'int is loosely based on a Moliere play. It is set in WWII and involves a WC Fields type, an Abbot and Costello type, Gene Kelly and Mae West. It is an old style Review, with tap dancing, limp songs tied together with minimal plot, and characters so thin that it was impossible to get involved with the goings on. Considering how sleepy I got after a glass of wine at dinner, it was just as well. Reba thought it was decent as a period piece. Our 3 star hotel is quite nice, very near the Embankment tube station, which makes it easy to get everywhere. At about $130 a night, it is really a bargain. However, it has no elevator and we are on the 3rd floor. That's a long way up! Food has been good although pricey. We went to an Italian restaurant near our theatres and had a pretty good pizzas rather similar to "California style." By the time we were done it cost the better part of $50. Friday was a magnificent day despite 40mph winds and some heavy local downpours. We had a continental breakfast here at the hotel and wandered over to Covent Garden. The weather held down the number of vendors and defeated the usual contingent of jugglers, clowns and magicians. We wandered around the London Transport Museum, and (surprise) bought a bear in a Leicester Square sweater. He matches our Russell Square bear. We had lunch in a fish and chips cafe, bought tickets for our Saturday matinee (no matinees on Friday) and took multitudinous wrong busses back to the hotel. Busses are frequent and handy here but the tube is almost fail-save and busses are not. Since we bought one-week bus/tube passes, the extra rides cost us nothing except embarrassment at getting on and off busses as quickly as possible to avoid going ever further from our intended destination. After a brief rest we had dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant close to the hotel. I had mussels for an appetizer, not in the usual white or red sauce but rather in diavelo sauce -- quite spicy and ever so good. I also had a tortellini stuffed with meat that was quite good but looked more like ravioli. Reba had a minestrone and a baked avocado that she declared excellent. We then went to see one of the last preview performances of a new play The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith. This is a play! It was spell binding to watch Maggie perform as a odoriferous bag lady who conned a London gentleman into letting her park her van in his London front yard for three months which turned out to be 15 years. The gentleman was played simultaneously by two actors so the audience could tell what was going on in "his" head while trying to deal with Maggie. It is a true story. We bought a booklet telling the story portrayed on stage. We came away wanting to know more, especially why, at some point in the saga, the gentleman didn't try to do something useful about Maggie's lack of sanitation facilities. While there are bound to be some re-writes, this play just might last for years. Very well done. After the show we tubed back to the hotel, had a desert in another little tea shop, and called it a day. Tomorrow will be a busier day. Saturday. Today was the day Yahoo predicted blizzards in London. Only it didn't happen -- no snow at all. I was up late last night working on the trip report and looked at Yahoo's weather report. The blizzards were no longer in the forecast. So I said to the sleeping Reba -- no blizzards, and she mumbled back to me "no lizards?" So I said blizzards and she repeated lizards. So now we talk of today as the day of no lizards. We moved rooms in the hotel this morning. No hot water and a telephone that buzzed like crazy. Too bad because it was a bigger room, but the new one is a floor below the old one reducing the stair climbing, thank goodness. We don't mind walking and ever climbing a few steps but this was getting old fast. British TV is very limited (4 channels around here) and very bad for news junkies like us. Nothing starts on time and the news is very different from back home. Even the Sunday Times of London is a bore. Thank goodness for the Internet. We saw two good plays today. The first was The Weir, suggested to us by our good friend Anne Lister, who joined us for the show. It's a story of four men and a woman who end up swapping ghost stories in an Irish Pub. It holds your attention, partly because it has no intermission, partly because the young woman seems so out of place until the end so she tends to be bigger than life, and partly because the actors spin the yarn finely. The stories themselves aren't all that exciting, but you don't notice that until it is over. The other play was excellent, though it badly needs pruning -- it is Copenhagen, the story of a meeting between the Jewish Danish Neils Bohr, leader of the team that gave forth nuclear physics, and the German Werner Heisenberg, father of the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear reactor program goes to Copenhagen in 1941 to meet with Bohr. Why? Nobody knows what was actually said at this meeting. It takes the author 2 1/2 hours to give his explanation. The answer to the question has much to do with the question of why the Germans never tried to make an atomic bomb. In the end, Bohr looks like a complete genius, and Heisenberg appears much more sympathetic than seemed likely at the start. Reba was impressed that the play could have run for over a year and survived a cast turnover and yet still be drawing sell-out crowds. It is not the material of popular plays -- yet it marches on. Recommended. It is Monday and we are near the end. We took it easy this morning, reading and working on this report. This afternoon we met up with a friend and had lunch in the crypt of St Martin's in the Field. A very pleasant way to spend a day. Then it was time for Lion King, the only play for which we needed to have bought tickets in advance. This was as spectacular as was to be expected and far less childish than Beauty and the Beast. It will be a "must see" for many years to come. The large animal puppets and the flowing colors are almost worth the price of admission (about $55). I'm glad we saw it. Even so, I must say that it was not an evening of great theatre. The ham bone plot was trivial, the music largely forgettable, and the acting unoriginal. The whole first act has the forces of evil in the ascendency, like the Nazis in WWII. The forces of good make a last desperate comeback, but the whole evening is spent uncomfortably waiting for the devil to have his due. Tuesday. This was our last day. Tomorrow we head back to the US and work. We could have seen Cats, Starlight Express, or Woman in Black for matinees but we had seen them before. So we decided to just browse around town. For the evening choice, it came down to "Spend, Spend, Spend," "Quartet," or "Collected Stories." This shows the depth of the London theatre scene -- despite having previous seen a dozen or so of the plays still going, and seeing 7 more plays this trip, there were still several excellent shows we still haven't seen. Another aspect of the London theatre scene is our ability to get tickets economically. Most theatres have senior tickets available at 12 pounds. less than half price, available at the theatre 1 hour before show time. You sometimes have your choice -- 17.50 pounds at the Leicester Square ticket booth at 12:00pm, 12.50 at the box office in the evening just before show time, or full-price or worse at the ticket agencies and hotel concierge. For this trip we had one premium ticket (Lion King) one full-priced ticket (Lady in the Van,) three seniors, and four Ticket Booth tickets. Not bad considering the list prices are around $50 a ticket. We elected to see Spend, Spend Spend and were not disappointed. It was about about a young coal-mining couple with 5 children who hit all 8 numbers worth the current equity of 3 milllion pounds. She said she would spend it and in 11 years, she did. Her final conclusion was that she was richest before she hit the lottery. It is a good show and I recommend it. So how do the plays rank?
1. Lady In The Van All in all, a fine trip.
Victor K Heyman
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