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So last night I got back around midnight from a day in London seeing shows.
I love shows.
I started out going through the Globe's exhibition, which is marvelous and vast and has miles of history exhibits and props and handmade costumes and techniques and even a pair of actors learning fight choreograpy on display. I loved it, and would go again.
At 2pm was the Globe production of Antony & Cleopatra. I knew Eve Best would be fantastic, and she was so far beyond it that she was the most compelling thing in the show. The Antony was great, the Caesar was hilariously whiny and pompous, the handmaidens were very charismatic, but it was Cleopatra's show and we all knew it. I teared up every time anything didn't go her way (which, as you might expect, was a lot of the time), and she pulled us all along with her in the best way. The Best way.
It drizzled intermittently throughout the first half, but it thickened into a good downpour by the end, and the amount of dialogue in this play to do with weather is sufficient that there were a lot more jokes than usual. And Eve Best, upon one of her regal entrances where she came to the front of the stage and out from under the roof, became a hilarious sympathetic pantomime of apologies to us groundlings standing in ankle-high water with buckets coming down on our heads; she came out in the slightly chilly wet with us and gave a speech about crocodile hunting and selected her prey and hooked a guy in the mouth with her finger and it was just the best thing. She's amazing. And I cried like a baby through her commiseration with the dying Antony and her own death scene. It was amazing.
And the whole experience was heightened by the downpour, and also by the fact that the guy standing next to me (and whom I had to ask for stageside space because he was leaning on it so far away from his friend) was a dead ringer for David Hewlett.
I took my nicely washed but achy feet off to the London Bridge tube station and made for Highgate, where Noel Fielding's show was going to be at Jackson Lane.
We got there ludicrously early, and I was so shocked to walk into the venue, go up to the ticket desk, and see Noel Fielding sitting abstractedly at a table 10 feet away with a couple of his people, that I could only grin encouragingly and try not to meet his eye as we got wristbanded. I then had to march right by him to go to the bathroom, though he had gone into the studio door by the time I got back.
So my mom and I sat on the nice leather lobby couches and read books as I tried to air-dry my rain-soaked clothes, and think about what a first-show Noel Fielding standup gig would be like. People started arriving about an hour after we got there, and it was packed by the time the house doors opened, about an hour after that. We filed in, all orderly, and though we weren't among the first through the door, there were two seats left open at the edge of the front row, which I was happy to take.
The show was ludicrous, unfinished, surreal, and charmingly underproduced as only Noel Fielding can pull off. He kept remarking (in the middle of jokes and all) about how strange it was to start a show with this bit, how he was 40 years old and was really doing this, how this was as far as they'd got with this piece, how he'd forgotten in the middle of writing this one that it was a dream and he bet you forgot too, how This Is Happening, and being sidetracked by interacting with the audience. He complained about how the biggest laughs are always from the stuff you don't write, and kept interrupting his own jokes by giggling helplessly, and he's the only comedian I've seen for whom that not only works, but enhances the actual funniness of the joke.
His brother Michael was in the show too, as well as his friend Tom Meeten, and sometimes the show would be interrupted by his just chortling gleefully at how funny he found them, which would only make a feedback loop of chortling with the audience. He makes the fourth wall into a kind of broken screen that he lifts when he finds it inconvenient, and sometimes forgets and walks right through.
It was rough, but in a kind of conspiratorial audience-inclusive camaraderie, with all the charm and very little of the annoyance of watching a seven-year-old put on a show he hasn't quite thought all the way through, in the front yard under the clothesline curtain.
I laughed harder than I usually laugh at his comedy, and I can't tell if that's because it was funnier or because there is nothing like his contagious giggle at himself live. In any case, my face hurt and I was exhausted even while I was asking the theatre staff to give him a tiny tree (I wrote a note to go with it, explaining how one of my dearest ambitions as a musician is to be just famous enough that no one knows who I am when I go on Buzzcocks), before the long trip back to the homestay.
Today I suspect we will be seeing a couple castles, and tomorrow is the meetup with historymiss for tea at the V&A and Julius Caesar at the Globe and then Holy Warriors on my own in the evening when she's got friends coming to her place. SO MANY SHOWS. If I lived in the UK, I would constantly have no money because I would spend it all on traveling to see shows.
I love shows.
I started out going through the Globe's exhibition, which is marvelous and vast and has miles of history exhibits and props and handmade costumes and techniques and even a pair of actors learning fight choreograpy on display. I loved it, and would go again.
At 2pm was the Globe production of Antony & Cleopatra. I knew Eve Best would be fantastic, and she was so far beyond it that she was the most compelling thing in the show. The Antony was great, the Caesar was hilariously whiny and pompous, the handmaidens were very charismatic, but it was Cleopatra's show and we all knew it. I teared up every time anything didn't go her way (which, as you might expect, was a lot of the time), and she pulled us all along with her in the best way. The Best way.
It drizzled intermittently throughout the first half, but it thickened into a good downpour by the end, and the amount of dialogue in this play to do with weather is sufficient that there were a lot more jokes than usual. And Eve Best, upon one of her regal entrances where she came to the front of the stage and out from under the roof, became a hilarious sympathetic pantomime of apologies to us groundlings standing in ankle-high water with buckets coming down on our heads; she came out in the slightly chilly wet with us and gave a speech about crocodile hunting and selected her prey and hooked a guy in the mouth with her finger and it was just the best thing. She's amazing. And I cried like a baby through her commiseration with the dying Antony and her own death scene. It was amazing.
And the whole experience was heightened by the downpour, and also by the fact that the guy standing next to me (and whom I had to ask for stageside space because he was leaning on it so far away from his friend) was a dead ringer for David Hewlett.
I took my nicely washed but achy feet off to the London Bridge tube station and made for Highgate, where Noel Fielding's show was going to be at Jackson Lane.
We got there ludicrously early, and I was so shocked to walk into the venue, go up to the ticket desk, and see Noel Fielding sitting abstractedly at a table 10 feet away with a couple of his people, that I could only grin encouragingly and try not to meet his eye as we got wristbanded. I then had to march right by him to go to the bathroom, though he had gone into the studio door by the time I got back.
So my mom and I sat on the nice leather lobby couches and read books as I tried to air-dry my rain-soaked clothes, and think about what a first-show Noel Fielding standup gig would be like. People started arriving about an hour after we got there, and it was packed by the time the house doors opened, about an hour after that. We filed in, all orderly, and though we weren't among the first through the door, there were two seats left open at the edge of the front row, which I was happy to take.
The show was ludicrous, unfinished, surreal, and charmingly underproduced as only Noel Fielding can pull off. He kept remarking (in the middle of jokes and all) about how strange it was to start a show with this bit, how he was 40 years old and was really doing this, how this was as far as they'd got with this piece, how he'd forgotten in the middle of writing this one that it was a dream and he bet you forgot too, how This Is Happening, and being sidetracked by interacting with the audience. He complained about how the biggest laughs are always from the stuff you don't write, and kept interrupting his own jokes by giggling helplessly, and he's the only comedian I've seen for whom that not only works, but enhances the actual funniness of the joke.
His brother Michael was in the show too, as well as his friend Tom Meeten, and sometimes the show would be interrupted by his just chortling gleefully at how funny he found them, which would only make a feedback loop of chortling with the audience. He makes the fourth wall into a kind of broken screen that he lifts when he finds it inconvenient, and sometimes forgets and walks right through.
It was rough, but in a kind of conspiratorial audience-inclusive camaraderie, with all the charm and very little of the annoyance of watching a seven-year-old put on a show he hasn't quite thought all the way through, in the front yard under the clothesline curtain.
I laughed harder than I usually laugh at his comedy, and I can't tell if that's because it was funnier or because there is nothing like his contagious giggle at himself live. In any case, my face hurt and I was exhausted even while I was asking the theatre staff to give him a tiny tree (I wrote a note to go with it, explaining how one of my dearest ambitions as a musician is to be just famous enough that no one knows who I am when I go on Buzzcocks), before the long trip back to the homestay.
Today I suspect we will be seeing a couple castles, and tomorrow is the meetup with historymiss for tea at the V&A and Julius Caesar at the Globe and then Holy Warriors on my own in the evening when she's got friends coming to her place. SO MANY SHOWS. If I lived in the UK, I would constantly have no money because I would spend it all on traveling to see shows.
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