London Weekend Number Three

Last weekend was my final weekend of going and seeing plays for the time being. When I got down to London, it was a bit strange because I couldn’t really think of where I wanted to go. I had been to much of what I had wanted to see of the city. Mostly I ended up walking around, killing time in the Burlington Arcades and in bookshops. The arcades were pretty cool just because they had a lot of used watch stores. Those who know me best know that I like a good watch. They had used watches by Omega, Breitling, Jaeger LeCoultre, Rolex… there was one store entirely devoted to vintage Rolex. They had Rolex’s from the twenties and even earlier. It was interesting for me to see that just because of how the company had evolved some of its designs in the past decades.

I did walk the down the Mall which is the road that leads up to Buckingham Palace. I also ate in a restaurant which had really crappy Disney muzak playing constantly on repeat. If I had to work there I would want to kill myself or if I didn’t, I slowly would have been driven insane.

The play I saw this past Friday was The Caretaker by Harold Pinter. It starred Jonathon Pryce as one of the main characters. He would be most notable to American audiences has having played the main villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. It was a good production. Pinter has a knack for dialogue as well as pauses which have been analyzed and debated over by scholars and critics alike. I had taken a class last year in which we had to read The Homecoming by him. There were lots of pauses in that too. This has also been one of my favorite theatre going experiences which was almost toppled by the following day’s production

Enron, a play about greed and corporate corruption based on that infamous company’s history integrating musical numbers, video clips as well as a lot of other symbols and metaphors I can’t even really begin to describe. They had business men dressed in suits wearing mouse heads using walking sticks for the blind. Three blind mice. They had men wearing raptor masks symbolizing the company’s other companies where they would dump all their debt. They had lightsabers representing how they had paralyzed California in the early 2000’s once the state had deregulated its energy holdings allowing the energy companies to raise prices astronomically. It was bleak, bitter, dark satire of the postmodern kind. It was one hell of a show which had me in hysterics at several points in the production.