I have attended four shows in my time in London: The Merry Wives of Windsor, 39 Steps, the Habit of Art, and Les Miserables.\u00a0 I have searched and searched to find a common thread that all four would have to define the theatre in England and have yet to come across it.\u00a0 There are some thematic similarities (thank you very much Jesse for pointing out the cross dressing), but overarching commonalities that I could use to define London theatre are difficult to find.<\/p>\n
The first play that we saw in London, The Merry Wives of Windsor, was understandably a tourist trap.\u00a0 It was at the New Globe (a touristy place if I\u2019ve ever seen one) and therefore, I had pretty low expectations.\u00a0 I expected a good piece of slapstick Shakespeare and that is exactly what I got.\u00a0 I got a \u201cgenuine\u201d Shakespeare experience \u2013 I stood right by the stage, listened to flippant German teenage tourists mock the English actors, and got in a good laugh.\u00a0 While there was some genuine real life Brits in line in front of us (I got to witness a queue-jumping situation that would have made Kate Fox dance with joy), I felt like I was not at a real English theatre event.<\/p>\n
39 Steps was, for me at least, the most real English theatre I witnessed.\u00a0 As it was a matinee, there were distinct groups of English people, namely a group from a convalescent home and a very large group of school children.\u00a0 The audience was very much stiffly British and listening to the aid in front of me explain the humor to the most ancient woman I\u2019ve ever seen made me feel the most immersed in British life I had been to that point.\u00a0 The most telling sign that I was truly experiencing British theatre was the rampant irony used in 39 Steps \u2013 most of which, I would like to point out, completely went over my head (I only knew that something funny was going on by the chuckles of my fellow theatre goers).<\/p>\n
The Habit of Art might not have made that much of impression on me simply because I did not enjoy it.\u00a0 Like most theatre I\u2019ve participated in back home, it struck me as an upper class audience out to enjoy a night of snobbishly intellectual theatre that they could go to a cocktail party and brag about.\u00a0 I know that during our tour our guide pointed out how they try to make the theatre financially accessible to everyone, but it was not something that I felt the ordinary Joe could go into an enjoy.\u00a0 The topic required some degree of literary knowledge, the humor was highbrow, and the audience was mainly fashionable and wealthy people who I would guess visit the theatre frequently.\u00a0 Overall, I felt no real connection to either the play or my fellow audience members.<\/p>\n
Les Miserables was perhaps my favorite piece of theatre.\u00a0 While, like The Merry Wives of Windsor, it was definitely geared towards tourists, I finally felt like I was somewhere where half the humor (and there was not much humor to choose from) was not going over my head.\u00a0 I could sit back, relax, pay attention to the lighting (thanks Rick!), and enjoy a night of good music.\u00a0 I loved that Les Miserables was not attempting to be anything more than it was and because of that, I was able to loosen up and enjoy the show.<\/p>\n
The four shows that I saw in London were all enjoyable and filled their own niche in the theatre community.\u00a0 Together they said nothing grand or profound about British theatre but individually had a lot to offer in terms of cultural explanation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have attended four shows in my time in London: The Merry Wives of Windsor, 39 Steps, the Habit of Art, and Les Miserables.\u00a0 I have searched and searched to find a common thread that all four would have to define the theatre in England and have yet to come across it.\u00a0 There are some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6678,78],"tags":[15124,15100,6773,15147],"class_list":["post-3612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-amy","category-theatre","tag-39-steps","tag-les-miserables","tag-merry-wives-of-windsor","tag-the-habit-of-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}