July 9, 2013

We took a wander through Hyde Park thinking that all the first rate cities in the world have big public parks.  We passed a Verizon store and ventured in to buy a Sym card.  An extremely helpful, slightly effeminate young guy found an appropriate pay as you go plan that would provide us with domestic and international phone calls plus 250 mgs of data. He took forever to set it up complaining there was a problem with the phones Internet. Unfortunately I failed to remember that I'd turned it off.  He did give us a couple of recommendations of plays we could see, The Disappearance of a Dog at Night and 

the Hot House. The dog play was our first preference however it was sold out so half price tickets for The Hot House it was. 

While headed toward the Tate Gallery, our destination, we passed the National Gallery and decided to take a gander. We quickly tired of the medieval and Renaissance paintings and went onto the impressionists and Pablo. The Tate was considerably more interesting with the very modern stuff that all has to be explained because the viewer's never going to get it otherwise. There was the beam with a big chunk of wood hanging from it and big turd size, shape and colour pieces of clay scattered on the floor beneath.  The African display consisted of a living room suite, shelves filled with items you might find in a craft store, a dining room and a puzzle room. 

"The Hot House" takes place in a mental asylum where the head psychiatrist has given up on the pavements and there's a Kafkaesk bureaucracy where the employees attempt to manipulate their way into position of power.  Written in the 1950's it holds some relevance to today however primarily dated.  The acting was fantastic and made what might have been a chore to watch quite enjoyable.  Simon Russell Beale's played the asylum head and is supposed to be one of the preeminent stage actors of today.  I laughed every time he was on stage.  

We had dinner after the theatre at a pub not far from where Daniel Radcliff was performing.  We were sitting at a table on the street so we had a perfect view of the young people, (mostly girls) emerge from the around the corner where they'd awaited Mr. Radcliff's outside the back entrance following his performance.  All held pieces of paper or were admiring their picture with him on their cell phones.  He's got to be very patient to put up with that kind of thing every night of his performance.