One Last Blog

Today we leave for the airport, to head home after a month in England. This month has been very fun, and as ready as I am to go back to Fayetteville I will definitely miss it. These past few days we have spent not in London, but in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small English town in the country where Shakespeare was born. This town has been a nice change of pace, it’s so quiet compared to the city and the air feels so much fresher. The town is very cute, it has a lot of nice restaurants and little shops, and the markets have been a lot of fun. We went to a riverside market yesterday and it was one of my favorite markets of the whole trip.

This town clearly has a lot of history, and exploring it through going to Shakespeare’s birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s cottage has been a lot of fun. It’s really cool to walk through these old houses that have been kept as they would have looked centuries ago. It just gives you a better idea for what life was like, giving context for the Shakespeare plays that we’ve gotten to see. Speaking of which, we saw a production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Company the other day, and it was way cooler than I thought it would be. I won’t lie, I didn’t fully understand the story, but I loved the production concept of having older actors play the roles they had played decades before, and the tech was surprisingly very cool. There were some hanging fluorescent style lights that would fly in to make swings at points, a whole band flew in from the sky, the entire back wall flew out to reveal a whole forest in the last few minutes. It was really cool, I had a lot of fun.

This past month I’ve taken in so much theatre, I think 17 shows in total, and I feel like I have learned a lot. Since I do design, it’s important to take in a lot of theatre so that I have images I can build off of in my head, and through this program I’ve seen both the best and the worst theatre I’ve ever had the opportunity to see, and all of it is valuable. Great theatre like Cabaret inspires me to make something just as impactful as that show was on me, and horrible theatre like How to Succeed makes me realize that I know enough now to know what makes a successful design and production and what does not. 

I’m so glad I decided to go on this study abroad, thanks for following along with me through these blogs!