After what has somehow been both a swift and a slow five days, I am now permitted to exit quarantine in my hotel room! Granted, I am not off the hook just yet. I still need to wear a mask as much as possible while in public for at least the next five days, and it would behoove me to do so for the rest of the trip so there is no chance I end up testing positive again when I head back to the States.
After getting breakfast and eating it in my room, I made a return visit to Watches of Switzerland on Regent Street to look at and try on models I failed to get to the first time. Most of these were more affordable than the ones I tried on initially, though what affordable means in the luxury watch market is very different to what affordable means in other product markets. There were some very classy options from Longines, and I took a second look at TAG Heuer and Grand Seiko models that I previously perused. I received excellent, friendly service from a sales associate named David, who enthusiastically talked to me about watch styles, watch complications (extra functions other than the typical twelve-hour time-telling) and was overall a stand-up guy.
Not much else of note happened between then and the tube ride over to the Almieda Theatre. I recall being uncomfortably sweaty by the time we got there because it was such a warm day and I had worn more formal clothes to the watch store, but that cleared up around when the show started. The play, The House of Shades, follows a working class (potentially upper-working class) British family through its dysfunctions, divides, and deaths from the 1960s all the way to 2019. We had been given a trigger warning by Shawn and Casey for various sensitive subject matters via group chat, and there were notices regarding those same subjects outside of the auditorium. Needless to say, this play, despite its moments of hilarity, dwells in the grim, tragic, and traumatic (appropriate, given its Greek tragedy inspiration), and none of which makes for a fun or pleasant night at the theatre.
But none of that makes for bad theatre either. The script contains some of the best written dialogue of anything I have ever read, novels included. The interplay feels natural, and I imagine the words on the page would be brimming with personality even without voices to speak it aloud. Though, that may not be entirely fair to the actors, who had spectacular ability and presence in their characters. Their immersion in their respective characters was so deep it bordered on dangerous; considering the things that they do, feel, and say in this play, it impresses and amazes me that this production can sustain itself at this level of realism for longer than a few days.
I liked the set well enough. It did what it needed to do, felt liked in by the characters, and yet it allowed for technical theatre tricks and nondisruptive entrances by declining to give the family home physical walls. The sound effects and music from one to another smoothly, and all seemed appropriately selected as well. That smoothness goes double for changes in lighting. I must say though, I did not like the projections they used to display the years as the play progressed because my seat location (in the center but towards the rear of the stalls) relative to the dress circle seating above kept me from seeing them. I feel the same way about the closed caption screen hung above in front of the downstage edge of the stage; I found myself wondering how many seats they could actually fill during enhanced access performances if every person seated needs to see the screen. That said, the fact that the Almieda even had a screen like that was a first for me, andI would love to see that done in more places.
I mentioned earlier in the post, but I have to touch back on the sensitive content in this show. It is intense, particularly in the second act, and what little buffer the jokes or occasional tenderness provided did as little as friction against the tracks does to slow a runaway train. It was emotionally draining as the first act trickles to a close, and the second drove me into the realm of exhaustion, if the shakiness in my legs when I got up to leave was anything to go by.
Prior to any discussion about the play with my fellows, I think this play squanders the power of the trauma it bombards the audience with. I feel like the play does not have a message or meaning; if it did, it was buried under too many layers of thematic gunk and traumatic debris to find. The list of themes in it is absurdly long. Domestic abuse, violence, the politics of economics, Us vs. Them, manhood and womanhood, generational trauma, cycles of abuse, motherhood, abortion, the extent of one’s responsibilities to oneself or others; and those are only the ones I can remember a few days later! It is TOO MUCH!!! I could not take five steps down a certain thematic track without being derailed and placed on another one! By addressing so many things with such equal strength so frequently, I feel like the play effectively addresses nothing (assuming, of course, that addressing a topic was the purpose of the play at all).
This play rattled me, hard. The entire trip back to the hotel I felt as though I had been kicked in the head and my brain had yet to stop spinning from the impact. It made me feel things I have not felt in a long time; maybe even some things I have never felt before. It is, without question, the most powerful piece of theatre I have ever seen, and the strength with which I hate it (or perhaps only fear it) surprises me.
Theatre in London U of A 
Andrew, thanks for this thoughtful blog. I agree–it may be one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen.
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