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We're back from England!

A brief wrap-up of the last couple of days...

The Good

Finally meeting bluespirit_star and xanthefic properly. Spent a lovely day with bluespirit_star, including the Eccentric London walk and a nice sit-down in the covered court at the British Museum, then had a very nice meal in Covent Garden with her and xanthefic.

Seeing the London production of The Producers. (I kept thinking how much better Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick would have been, but then Conleth Hill, who we saw last year in Democracy, stole the show and made it all too much fun.)

The Bad:

Food poisoning. (Note to self: Never have prawn salad sandwiches from Pret á Manger again.) I've never had aches and fever from food poisoning before, and I'm still recovering four days later.

The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union at the Donmar Warehouse. Really, the title should have been warning enough, but it starred one of my fave stage actors, Michael Pennington. Alas, good actors cannot save a crap play. To add insult to injury, the next show at the Donmar sounds totally cool (This Is How It Goes by Neil LaBute, starring Ben Chaplin and Idris Elba). Oh, for a time machine. Or another ticket to London.

It was a lovely time, but I'm glad to be home.

And I'll be off to MediaWest in a week and a half...

Yesterday was a lovely day spent with llinos and marigoldg in Oxford. We toured various Tolkien related sites, had lunch at the Eagle and Child pub (a.k.a. the Bird and Baby) where Tolkien and the other Inklings used to meet, and generally had a lovely time. If you want to see photographic evidence, check out llinos's journal at http://www.livejournal.com/users/llinos/31667.html. knittedmerry took me on a bit of an adventure.

In theatre news, last night I saw Julius Caesar, with Simon Russell Beale as Cassius, Anton Lesser as Brutus, John Shrapnel as Julius Caesar and Ralph Fiennes as Mark Antony. The production had a very modern setting, with the Senators dressed like City business men and the mob appearing as London street people, and the direction was stunning. The acting was uniformly good too. (Don't worry, faramir_boromir, I'll give you the details later.)

Tuesday night we saw Henry IV, Part 2, and astoundingly I think it might have been more successful that Part 1. Part 2 is not one of my favourites and large stretches of it usually come across as dead boring, IMO. In this production, though, they actually managed to make the Justice Shallow stuff genuinely funny, which I though impossible. Didn't hurt that a) John Wood was playing Shallow and b) they made a lot of judicious cuts to those scenes. David Bradley, as the king as stood out this time. He was a bit weak as Henry IV in Part 1, but as the dying king his frailty was perfect. Alas, Matthew Macfadyen while good, will not be giving Antony Sher a run for his money any time soon. He was very good in the confrontation with his father, but he got a bit shouty in his final scene with Falstaff. A more modulated take on that scene would be more effective. Well, I think so, anyway.

Today is a major theatre day: Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, with Aiden Gillen and Jonny Lee Miller this afternoon; Theatre of Blood with Jim Broadbent tonight.

And tomorrow I get to hang out with bluespirit_star!

I can't believe we leave for London on Friday. I have too much to do before then (including making more headway on my new vid for MediaWest, and not forgetting the laundry), but I'm so looking forward to the trip. I get to hook up with bluespirit_star, as well as a friend from my university days who has taken up residence in the U.K.

But, as always, my main reason for going over is the theatre.

( What I'll be seeing... )