Let's Go to the Theatre

This past week I had my first London theatre experiences.  The first was "The Big Fellah" at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre.  The play was about the IRA during the decades leading up to the 9/11 attacks.  It was a rather serious play, but it was really good.  It was funny to hear British people attempt to do American accents.  The most hilarious one the actor playing an Irish New Yorker living in the Bronx...yea, that accent most definitely wasn't accurate haha.  But it was still good just the same. 

I also saw Henry IV part 1 at the Globe, which I liked much more.  I wish I had read the play before I saw it, but it was actually kind of interesting to witness it like someone who during Shakespeare's time couldn't have read the play beforehand.  I could make out the gist of the storyline, but that was completely secondary to the acting, the gestures, the expressions, and the energy the actors had.  It was a great performance.  And Roger Allam played Falstaff, and aparently Allam is a quite famous British theatre actor, so it was cool to see such a professional so close.  I did notice that his level of performance had a marked higher quality than the others before I found out who he was in class two days later.  The Globe itself was amazing.  I expected it to be bigger, more fancy, and catering to the elite.  But really, that is not what the theatre was about at all.  It catered to the masses.  It felt more like a rustic, lived-in living room than a theatre.  I sat dead center in the upper balcony, so I could see all the people in the groundling section.  The audience was interesting to watch as well--it was all very casual, as people ate and had small side conversations and looked around.  I liked the atmosphere a lot. 

The chorus parts of Shakespeare's plays now make way more sense than they ever did from just reading them.  When you read, they stick out and don't really contribute to the overall plot and seem like something that should be cut out.  But, when performed, they really do act as a comic relief.  The bar scenes of this play were my favorite because they had tons of energy and music and dancing and often included some audience participation.  The other part I enjoyed was Hotspur's death scene.  Yes, I've always known Shakespeare tends to side with the melodramatic when it comes to death (Hamlet much, yes?) but to actually watch it...I'm not going to lie, it is just as funny when done seriously as when done in a mocking fashion.  Hotspur took a grand total of 10 minutes to die from a direct stab in the heart...all the while explaining away and offering his opinion.  And to make it even funnier, everyone else on stage at the point on the battlefield were dead, so this soliloquy was spoken to no one in particular, just the audience.  haha. It was good.  I loved it.

I have pictures--they will be on my Zink Link group page on facebook, along with the pictures of my room that I've already put up.