Happy Midsummer!

Did you know the summer solstice is actually sort of a holiday here? Well, it is. And have I told you that it stays light here until after 10:00 every night? Well, it does. And that's all I have to say about the sun. So, new paragraph!

I saw Patrick Stewart last night! And no, I didn't actually get to meet him although we did try. We went to the stage door afterwards with several other people and waited for the actors to come out. The woman who played Cleopatra, Harriet Walter, who was effin' BRILLIANT, came out and signed our programs and was very nice and wished us all luck in our careers and so forth. Incidentally, if you love Sense and Sensibility like I do (and I'm guessing Mom might be the only person reading this who also loves that movie) you should know that she played Fanny Dashwood. She has actually had a very impressive stage career, but that's just something you might know her from, anyway. At any rate, she came out and did the whole autograph thing, but Patrick Stewart just slipped out the stage door a few minutes later wearing a cap and basically just kept his head down and jogged right on by. Mindy did call out, "Excellent work, Mr. Stewart!" and he said, "Thank you!" but he didn't stop to talk to anyone. And honestly, you can't blame the guy. Think of all the crazy trekkies I'm sure he's had to deal with in his lifetime.

Anyway, the show itself was awesome. I LOVED it. I wish I could see it again, actually. Patrick Stewart has terrific stage presence and made a wonderful Antony, and like I said, Cleopatra was the best I could have possibly imagined. Usually you think Cleopatra is going to be kind of harsh, or just very sexual and sort of bewitching, but Walter's Cleopatra had so much warmth and humor (ha, I almost typed "humour", the Brits are rubbing off on me...you should try typing a paper here, the spell check tries to change everything) and she brought so much depth to the role. Seriously, it was just super acting all around.
Unfortunately, there was a serious technical problem during the show. In Antony and Cleopatra as Antony is dying he is raised up to be with Cleopatra on her monument. There are different ways to do this, but in this show they actually put him into a harness on a pulley and raised him up into the air. So it's like, the absolute climactic moment of the play, and Patrick Stewart is in this harness and is slowly and very dramatically raised two stories above the stage, and Cleopatra is reaching out to him from the third floor balcony, and the lighting is haunting and beautiful music is playing and then the stage manager steps out from the wings and says, "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlement, we're going to have to stop the show. So let's lower Patrick back down, please, and ladies, if you can come down from the balcony to the stage."
My heart was in my throat. Immediately my mind started running through all these different scary scenarios. I went "Riot outside? Terrorist threat? Really bad storm? Fire? Patrick is actually hurt?" in a matter of about 2.5 seconds. Seriously, it's a sad fact, but any time something like that happens now I immediately worry that it's some sort of scary terrorist thing. Anyway, the stage manager went on to say that there was just a problem with the set, that the portion of the stage that the women were standing on was supposed to lower to meet Antony but wasn't working properly so they were going to have to just continue the scene from the stage floor. So we sort of missed out on the big dramatic moment, but hey, that's part of the fun of live theater! You never know exactly what you're going to see. Apparently that's the only time the set has ever malfunctioned like that. So it was a bit disappointing to not have the full effect, but I'm glad we at least got the cool visual of Antony hanging above the stage. Plus it gave interesting insight as an actor/director/stage manager to see the way that the stage manager kept her cool and handled the situation and the way that the actors stayed perfectly in character and weren't at all phased and were able to pick up right where they'd left off. Patrick Stewart actually continued to just lie on the floor seemingly near death during the whole ordeal, and Harriet Walter came racing down the stairs onto the stage and threw herself to his side still completely in character even though the show had stopped and several techies were standing on stage. That's some serious professionalism. And then once the show started again I was immediately pulled back into the story within seconds. Ah, the talent and grace under pressure!

Anyway, I was enthralled by the show and I'm so happy I got to see it. So both shows we've seen here so far have been fantastic. Tonight we see Much Ado About Nothing.

After the show last night Alex Mc, Amanda and I went to the Dirty Duck for a while. That's the pub here right across from the theatre where all the actors go to hang out. It was alright, although a bit too pretentious for me. I'm not really into schmoozing, you know? Apparently the group that came last here hung out there all the time, but I'll take the Lamplighter over the Dirty Duck any day. Plus the other Americans studying at the Trust right now, a group from New York (we don't take classes with them, we only see them in the halls and stuff) were there last night and on the whole they're sort of a snobby group of people. We keep trying to be friendly to them, smiling and saying hi and such, and they ignore us completely every time. Oh well, at least we try.

Today was a full day. We had rehearsal for our showcase scenes this morning, which went fine. On our walk to rehearsal this morning Mindy, John and I were running lines as we walked down the street and I suddenly realized that I was standing in the town where Shakespeare might very well have written those lines for the first time. Given, odds are he actually wrote a lot of his plays in London, but the fact that he could have was kind of a cool thought. After lunch we had several talks, first a post-show talk about Antony and Cleopatra, then we got to have a Q&A session with Keith Oswald, the actor who plays Agrippa in the show. So that was cool. And then after that Russell Jackson came to talk to us about Much Ado. I was excited to meet him since he's a dramaturg (or a "text advisor", which is what he told us he personally likes to call his job. But it's the same thing, basically) and we had actually talked a lot about him in my Dramaturgy class. It's always so weird (but awesome!) to meet people you've learned about in classes in real life. Anyway, he has been the text advisor on all of Kenneth Brannagh's Shakespeare films (Hamlet, Much Ado, etc.) and he also was the advisor on Shakespeare in Love, which I didn't know but was happy to find out. He gave a really entertaining lecture.

Anyway, the library is closing in ten minutes and I need to go eat dinner and get ready for the show tonight anyway, so I'm out of here. Tomorrow is just as packed with activities as today is so I'm not sure that I'll have time to post, but I'll try. And if I don't post tomorrow I definitely won't be posting on Friday since we'll be in London for the day on Friday. In other words, if you don't hear from me again until Saturday or Sunday don't worry.