Just A Few Tours

The last few days have been filled with lots of theatre and tours of different areas. We went back to the Globe and watched the Globe Mysteries, which was essentially a collection of excerpts from the Bible. It was an interesting production, but I was not a big fan of it, probably because I am not very religious. Also, as time progressed in the show, they made the costumes more modern. This is what one would expect to happen, except the costumes got WAY too modern for me. For example, when we arrived at Jesus' crucifixion, the people nailing him to the cross were wearing construction worker outfits and when King Harrod was killing babies, his henchmen were dressed as thugs. One aspect of the costuming I did like, however, was that one character who became the Devil, Lucifer, had a tattoo of his name across his chest that was visible on stage. When he played other evil and devilish characters the tattoo was still visible, symbolizing that they were of the devil.

In addition to the Globe Mysteries, we took a tour of the National Theatre and saw a production called The Kitchen, which is about a bunch of people working in the kitchen of a restaurant in Europe. I was not a fan of this production either, though everyone else seemed to enjoy it. It was very different, realist, and did not really seem to have a plot. I felt like I was watching a live reality show which would normally be okay, except I was expecting there to be a more defined plot as that is how traditional theatre is done. Though I was not a fan of the play as a whole, I thought that the directing and the acting was extremely well done.

The night before The Kitchen, we saw a performance of Holst's The Planets at the Proms. I thought this performance was excellent, though I find that I prefer to listen to classical music in the comfort of my room as I was very distracted throughout the piece by watching all of the people play their instruments and therefore could not take as much in as I would have liked. Tonight we are going the the last night of the Proms at Hyde Park. Luckily the weather is a bit nicer today (knock on wood!) so it should prove to be a fun evening!