10 am, and we’re on a Coach headed through London. Our tour guide, Molly, and driver, Grant, seem just as enamored with the pulsing traffic and rain-washed buildings as I am. We pass St. Clement’s church, and Molly tells us to take stock of the pockmarks, like freckles, on its exterior. “Much of this place was damaged during the war,” she says. And I think of scarring, of a small, particular indentation I noticed on my cheekbone this morning. I think of skeletons (how they hold us upright) and just how much work it must have taken to build this place back from the bones of old homes. Someone asks her to sing the nursery rhyme, “Oranges and Lemons,” and she does so with only the vaguest lilt of hesitancy.
Everywhere we look, there’s old mixed with new. A museum (I can’t remember which) fades past us on the right. Shadows of glass meet deep stone arches as its newest addition joins with the original space. Molly refers to this as a sort of “spongecake” effect and reminds us that the original Roman cities that existed here are tucked away in a deeper layer. With each year, still, more layers are set on top. I think what’s surprised me the most about the city so far is the fact that construction is in progress almost everywhere. There’s something peculiar about seeing sheets of plastic overtop of stone, but it speaks to the kinetic energy that surrounds this place. Nothing is still here, and yet, so many reminders of the past stay rooted where they are.
Even the trees, manage to grow wide and windblown in the middle of streets as if to say, “I was here first, I am lovely, take your time and walk around me.” And that word, “lovely,” is exactly what our tour guide keeps saying as she tells us about how lucky she was to study Art History here, and how lucky she is to to be here now winding through the streets in a coach in the rain. Lovely, is what comes to mind when I look up at the flowers that pour from every well-worn window they can find. As we walk outside Buckingham Palace and up through Piccadilly circus, though, I realize I’ve spent too much time letting my thoughts drift into flowers, and leaves, and color.
Did I remember to get a picture of myself in front of Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain? No. Did I snap a side glance at a very purple door that matched some very purple trash? Absolutely I did. But seriously, who color coordinates their porch stoop with their trash? By the time I forget about purple, we make it to the tube station with its long, circuitous, tentacle-like tunnels, and quite literally crush into the train car. I’m not entirely sure that I understand the tube system, but I’ll learn it soon if only for the couple shuffling their suitcases past us that gently rolled their eyes and sighed, “first time on a train?” Back in my room, even as I run through all of the moments where I could have been more present, I keep reminding myself of a road sign that I saw on the way back to the hotel that said something like, “you are here (really!).” I make it a mantra that I can carry around with me for a while: you are here, deep breaths, you are here.
Straight Line Crazy Review
“Grand” is the word stuck in my head after seeing Straight Line Crazy at the Bridge Theatre: grand in scale and grand in imagination. Ralph Fiennes’s Robert Moses is invested in the supposed vastness of his own ideas. He dreams of what leisure time could look like if New Yorkers were able to travel freely on highways. Yet, this dream is completely insular to his own experience as a wealthy, white man. Fiennes is able to communicate this sense of extroverted isolation in such a nuanced way. Everything that Moses says reverberates, but Fiennes continually moves away from the other actors as the characters’ grievances against him grow louder, and we get the sense that Moses is only ever in conversation with himself. Moses is in a constant dance between wanting human relationships with the people surrounding him, like Finnuala and Ariel, and needing to accomplish his own obsessive vision. The way that Fiennes as Moses retreats from Finnuala’s questions about his wife, Mary, is almost childlike as he begs her not to bring up anything personal. I think this inability to accept the kindness and grief of others is what made Moses’s character surprisingly difficult to dismiss as a mere antagonist.
In a sense, the production felt like watching someone’s dream from the outside. As the play goes on, the small maps that cover the space where Moses and his team plan the city streets shift to one large map that spans most of the stage floor. Looking down from above, the sheer scale of the map looks almost warped or melodramatic. If you’re standing on the map, just as Moses constantly hovers inside his dream for the future, it must appear to be all encompassing. If you’re above the map, however, it simply doesn’t seem real. For Finnuala and Ariel, Moses’s plans grow to be increasingly unrealistic and exclusionary even as they broaden in Moses’s mind. I wonder if the audience closest to the stage had the same experience or if the perspective of Moses as a character is less defined depending on how much of the highway plans you can see. One thing that I wanted from this production, however, was a bit more breathing space to sit with the characters and what they were communicating. I’m not sure if the pace of a rapidly expanding New York inspired the abrupt rhythm of the dialogue, but it felt almost rushed. Even at the end, the lights seemed to go out in the middle of the final lines. Then again, maybe I just didn’t want it to end quite so soon.
Theatre in London U of A 
Kath, this first post is so beautiful and poetic! I loved reading your initial thoughts and impressions of London and our first play.
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