A Brief Updates With Pictures

BUSY!!!! This is essentially our last week of classes and next week we have a final performances in almost every class…hmmm, I should probably be working on those projects now. Anyway, hopefully after next week I can post many amazing pictures and videos of these projects for you to enjoy. But for now, here are some pictures of the last couple of weeks to assure you that I am alive and well in London town.

Easter Eggs


Fire of London Memorial


Remains of original Roman London


A Wagamama (just for Katie Davis)


Imelda Staunton and LDA

Stratford, Sicilia, and Shakespeare: Exit, Pursued by a Bair

Bright and early on Thursday morning the entirety of the London Dramatic Academy, including Richard Digby-Day and Michael Winter, boarded a coach and began our 2.5 hour pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon. LDA had rented for us one of those tourist travel-coaches that look like airplanes inside, are very conspicuous and awkward on the road and are fitted with a microphone, a feature taken full advantage of by Richard. During the 2.5 hours, about half that time was filled with Richard lecturing about Stratford, Kenilworth Castle (our first stop on the trip), Shakespeare and “A Winter’s Tale” (the show we were seeing in Stratford that night). When we finally arrived at Kenilworth Castle we were certainly ready to have a good run around castle ruins and English countryside.
Kenilworth Castle is a ruined castle a few miles outside of Stratford which had a very interesting history through the English Civil War and then, as Richard explained, “it more or less has become very boring since then.” Originally built by William the Conqueror, the most interesting part of its history was when it belonged to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and where Dudley apparently made his grandest and most obvious attempt to impress and woo Queen Elizabeth I. As we were looking at the one restored area of the ruins, the Elizabethan gatehouse, Michael Winter crept up behind me and my friend Anne, tapped us on the shoulder and said “did you see the fireplace downstairs? I touched that. Queen Elizabeth must have touched that when she was here. Go along, go touch it!” And we did.
Around noon we all returned to the bus and finally drove into Stratford. The town of Stratford (upon the Avon river) is a strange one—some sections are a very nice, normal, English country town, other parts are like a Shakespeare theme park. Everything in the center of Stratford has a Shakespeare-y name: Othello’s restaurant, Falstaff Towers flats, If Music Be the Food of Love café. The street with Shakespeare’s birthplace is filled with these sorts of restaurants, Shakespeare bookstores, and occasionally actors dressed in Elizabethan garb wandering the street performing famous scenes. After lunch we were split into two groups, one led by Richard and mine led by Michael, for a walking tour of Stratford.
Michael Winter is the greatest and best of all men, and he LOVES Shakespeare and reading Shakespeare and thinking about Shakespeare and imagining what his life was like. In Shakespeare class, he always tells us what his best guess is to which role in each play Shakespeare wrote for himself. So, it wasn’t surprising that the route that Michael chose to tour us through Stratford was what he believed to be the walk Shakespeare would have taken to school everyday. Starting from Shakespeare’s birthplace we saw Shakespeare’s school, his church, the location of the home he bought for himself (torn down a few centuries ago over some sort of tax dispute) and we ended by seeing his grave. We then walked along the Avon to where the Royal Shakespeare Company would be performing “A Winter’s Tale” that night.
I’d never seen or read “A Winter’s Tale” so I was excited to see what the RSC would do. Unfortunately, it was just not a good production. Michael and Richard hated it, and kept falling asleep. It’s really an amazing play, but the script—which calls for a baby, and bear, a satyr dance, and a statue coming to life all on stage—is very difficult and needs good direction and clear use of the language to make any sense of all. The best part of the play actually was the bear, which wasn’t real as Michael supposed the one in the original production would have been since there was a bear-bating ring next to the original Globe, but was a massive and amazing puppet. Some of my fellow students complained that this production changed Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” (the character wasn’t so much pursued as eaten on stage) but I didn’t mind.
After the show we got back on the bus for a long ride home, arrive at 12:30am, and then we were back to classes at 9:30 the next morning. It was a delightfully Shakespeare filled day for one and all.

Visits, Protests and Inspiration

It has been an eventful week. Today was our first day back to classes after our second break, but much more occurred in those 5 days of break than I often get to witness in a normal week. To start, this week Barack Obama finally paid me a visit in London so that I was, for the first time, in the same country as our most awesome President. My second visit came on Friday when my dearest dear friend Christy Henderson flew from Vienna, Austria (where she is studying Economics and eating cake and drinking coffee and speaking German) to spend the weekend with me. She hadn’t spent much time in London before, so we enjoyed some very touristy activities. On Saturday alone we saw: Trafalgar Square, the National Portrait Gallery, Big Ben, Parliament, the Eye, the National Theatre, the Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Buckingham Palace. Saturday night we went pub hopping, and Christy was treated to the strange phenomena of bad American music from 5-15 years ago being played full blast to pubs full of middle-aged Londoners. On Sunday we went on a lovely walk through Hyde Park, ate French food on the run, took a double-decker bus home, explored Maida Vale and Little Venice and sampled all varieties of British candy and cookies. On Monday she flew back to Vienna after having crammed weeks worth of London activities into 2 days.
Meanwhile, the gear-up for the G20 summit was in full swing. On Saturday when Christy and I exited the Tube in Trafalgar Square we stumbled upon a 50,000 person strong protest march all along the route I had chosen to walk Christy along. Hundreds of groups were represented in the march that wound past Trafalgar Square and down towards Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. Most of the march was made up of groups with matching t-shirts and big signs, some had marching bands, others mega-horns, but a few of the groups were truly frightening and memorable. What stands out most to me from the march, other than the sheer number of people involved, was the group that had made huge Carnival-esque puppets
representing the riders of the apocalypse following a sign that read “CAPITALISM ISN’T WORKING.” Thankfully this huge march remained peaceful, but witnessing that number of people all in one place made it very clear in my mind that any of these events could turn into horrible violence and chaos very easily. As it was, the protest was a somewhat ominous, but overall an amazing example of organized and positive protest.
The fervor over the G20 has put London in a strange mood, and ending this break, which more or less marks one month to go until the end of my studies in London, has put everyone in my program in a strange mood as well. To counteract this moodiness, last night my flatmate Kat and I made the best choice we’ve ever made and got student rush tickets (in the 4th row wonderfully enough) for the play Three Days of Rain. Our main motivation for going to this show was, slightly embarrassingly, to see handsome Scottish actor James McAvoy live on stage, but it turned out that this show was the best one we have seen since coming to London. An excellent script, a perfect cast, amazing direction, everything about this show was good. EVERYTHING. James McAvoy was brilliant. His performance literally re-inspired me in my love of theatre and, cheesy as this sounds, reminded me why I am here in the first place. The whole show in fact was an inspiration and Kat and I could barely speak after it was over. We ran immediately from the theatre to the stage door to try to speak to the actors and tell them how much we appreciated their performances. Pretty quickly, the area was swarmed by teenage girls and middle-aged women desperate to see James McAvoy. When he finally came out to sign autographs we somehow managed to grab his attention, tell him we were in drama school, and badly articulate how moving his performance had been. He then proceeded to give us advice and encouragement about drama school and acting, and basically proved himself to be the best person in the world. I was so excited to go back to classes today, and the James McAvoy magic worked, because my tutors were all happily surprised at my newfound energy and motivation.
Well, that’s quite enough for one blog post, but if anyone wants to hear more about James McAvoy, feel free to ask.