Portraits and Plays

Well, as I mentioned at the end of my last post, we went to see "Blood Brothers" in the West End on Monday night. I can't claim to have loved it. Decent music, and decent story, but nothing extraordinary. Still, it was a fun play, we were in the fourth row, and it was free. I have to admit, the closeness of the actors had me thinking about my Hamlet ticket - just a little bit ;)

Yesterday we had a kind of lazy class. I think my teacher is waiting until the plays start to really get into the big stuff. So we watched Shakespeare in Love - a movie I own and have probably seen about 37 times. lol. But it was still fun, and I HAVE actually been wanting to see it again. According to my teacher it's one of the best films at portraying Shakespeare's world. I can see that.

After class we had all afternoon free, so I went with a group of about 8 people down to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square for shopping and wandering.

The group in the Underground:


The group at Piccadilly Circus:


Me alone at the Eros Statue in Piccadilly Circus:


Piccadilly Circus:


Group in a London Phone Booth:



On a spontaneous whim, we decided to go to the National Portrait Gallery, which is one of a handful of museums I didn't go to on my last trip to London. It really was a lovely museum. Between the three floors of the museum they have portraits ranging from the Tudor period to modern times, of everyone from English royals, to politicians, and celebrities. There were portraits of Dickens, the Bronte Sisters, Charles Darwin, Shakespeare.

I had two moments of awesome in the museum. The first was on the 17th-18th century floor. In the same room, on opposite walls, they have a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft facing a portrait of Mary Shelley. I thought that was particularly awesome, considering the deep connection between those two. Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Shelley, and Shelley was haunted by the memory of her mother her entire life. They were never able to be together in life, so their portraits are together in memory of them. That's just fabulous.

The second, on a slightly sillier note, was in the modern section they had an entire room of portraits of black British actors. There were portraits in there of FIVE DIFFERENT actors who have done roles on Doctor Who, including Noel Clarke! They also had a portrait of Chiwetel Ejiofor in there, who I just adore.

We were tired after the gallery, and wanted to just kind of chill somewhere for a while, so we went up to the museum restaurant on the top floor, which had an AMAZING view of Westminster...but was closing in five minutes. So we somehow ended up wandering around for an hour and a half, before just wandering into the first place we saw when we decided we couldn't stand for another minute.

heh. This was entertaining in the end. We were so tired that we waited until after ordering before really taking note of our surroundings. Apparently we wandered into a combination gay bar/nightclub/restaurant. We were literally the only women, and only straight people in the room. But damn...the food was good there. I had this chicken, potato, and sun-dried tomato salad in honey mustard dressing that was really fresh and absolutely divine.

We were pretty wiped though, so after dinner we just headed back to the flat for the evening and chilled in the common room all night. Still, it was a really nice day, and I absolutely loved the National Portrait Gallery.

Today is our first big Shakespeare day! We are off to the Globe Tour and then we are seeing King Lear and having a "discussion" with the actors after the play! Should be fun!