I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the V&A yesterday. I spent about an hour in the theater exhibit looking at every piece, reading the cards, and watching all the videos. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to do that with the rest of the museum, so I tried to take in each piece of art at a quicker pace, and was still only able to get through to about half of the second floor before calling it quits at 3. I absolutely love this museum and feel that it is so wonderfully curated. I particularly loved the spaces that were reconstructed rooms from the past. They were beyond beautiful and made me feel like I had been transported to a completely different time and place.
As for the theater exhibit, I had a blast. There was one particular piece that stood out to me, which was a page of script from the show Fleabag. It had the writing of Phoebe Waller-Bridge (who wrote and acted in the play) and her notes on the scene. It was interesting to see, as I have never seen the stage play but have seen the television show based on it. I snapped a picture because it is one of my favorite television shows ever, and I wanted to go back and watch the proshot of the play later.
Along that television line, there was a lot of television-related material in the theater room, but it was all from Netflix. Clearly, they wrote a check to help fund the space, so the first part when you walk in had a huge screen playing a behind the scenes of the Crown, and then the case directly next to it was about Peaky Blinders, and then the case next to that was about another Netflix show that I was unfamiliar with but had read the book for and didn’t overly love. I think they needed that hook to get people in the door, which I totally understand and I know that not everyone loves theater, but for a space with theater in the title, I wish it would’ve been more present at the beginning.
I did find it interesting as well that they put all the super famous costumes all together in one section. I feel like spreading them out a bit more could’ve kept people engrossed, but I know they wanted to break up the exhibit by department. Costumes tend to be the thing that have the easiest and most obvious visual interest (the second being scenic models) so having those with a wee more space between each other, and instead having the exhibit as more of a timeline could’ve also been interesting. That being said, basically, the rest of the museum is in some sort of timeline in each exhibit, so I understand why they wanted to do something different in this space. After I left the theater space and went into the rest of the museum, the amount of objects was overwhelming. I particularly felt overwhelmed by the cast rooms on the right side of the building. The scale was intense yet so stunning. I loved that there was art there that wasn’t accessible to those in England, but was then made accessible through recreation. I am sure it is a very controversial topic, but I enjoy anything that makes art easier for people to access, so this was a win in my book. Also, while it was a lot of space, it was barely a fraction of the entire museum, the rest of it being dedicated to new works, so I thought it worked out wonderfully.
Theatre in London U of A 