I Love the London Underground, and Ralph Fiennes

London Tube

The London Underground made a strong first impression on me, even in the wake of a taxing day of travel which left me feeling jet-lagged and more than a bit sick. Once on the Piccadilly line into the city from Heathrow, I was struck by three notable differences when compared to metro systems I’ve used before (particularly those in Rome and New York): the size of the cars, the comfort, and the quiet. London’s cars were two-thirds the height of other metro cars I’ve been on at most, and perhaps as a result are much quieter, even to the point of being entirely silent when stopped. In addition, the cushioning of the seats makes for a much more comfortable, if not slightly more cramped ride. In terms of navigation, I have not used a simpler system in my life. The layout is clear, the mapping is descriptive, and the stations are less maze-like than other cities. Undoubtedly much of this has to do with the history and geography of the city, but I am grateful for the ease of use, all the same.

[now playing: London – Third Eye Blind]

Straight Line Crazy

While I believe David Hare’s Straight Line Crazy has nominal issues with structure and exposition (particularly relying too heavily on dialogue, to reveal what is ultimately too little too late about some of its significant characters) I feel strongly that there is not a better play to have started this learning journey in London. The show was a seamless topical blend of my two areas of study, architecture and theatre, and provided a glimpse into an important historic shift in America’s socio-economic fabric through the eyes of urban planner Robert Moses. Ralph Fiennes expertly imbued him with vigor, resolve, and the right amounts of desperation, dedication and arrogance to prove to the audience that Moses was a well-intentioned man who saw the very fabric of the nation shift beneath him, turning him from a visionary for the people to out-of-touch dictator in just the quarter-century between 1926 and 1955 (and ultimately into a pariah, along with those the play’s younger characters hail as heroes, by the turn into the 21^st).

I think the play’s choice to center the two acts on these specific years of Moses’s life, and the sharp contrast in tone between the two halves, drives home the central nuance of the play’s message. Ultimately, Robert Moses was a flawed but genuinely dedicated man who exhibited all the common moral downfalls of his time (namely thinly veiled racism underpinning all his work). However the takeaway from Moses’s interactions with his employees and political opponents and/or allies (played with conviction by an impressive supporting cast) is that during a time when turmoil and newfound agency within the American middle class was a defining characteristic of the national landscape, the heroic architect quickly became an impossibility, as much because of their changing context as their own shortcomings and lack of foresight. Straight Line Crazy shows us this phenomenon through Robert Moses, but he is representative of a greater pattern at the macro-scale which was a huge part of America’s journey into the contemporary era of policy and design.

[now playing: The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Bob Dylan]

Photos: I actively chose to avoid taking many photos on our first real day in the city, in an effort to force myself to engage more closely with what I was seeing. That ended up being poor judgment for the purposes of this blog post, but luckily I snagged a few good ones of St. Pancras (!!!) and the Tower Bridge… enjoy

-Shiloh Bemis