March is Making Me Anxious, Plus THEATRE!

Here at Queen Mary, school is finished in March. Well, yes, we have our exams in May/June, but that's mostly for non-drama people, and since I am mostly a drama person here, I only have one exam then. Basically, once March 31 rolls around, I am home free (until I have to study for my history exam... but you get the point.)

Sounds cool, right? Yeah. It is. Except that because school ends in twenty-eight day, it's basically The Month of Long Assignments All Given At the Same Time. It's really freaking me out. I have my Proof essay due on Friday... which I hope is okay- I've pulled out enough of my hair over it already. Then in the final week of March, I have three long papers, one short one, and a performance- ahhhhh! I'm mostly worried about the history paper. Like I think I've said before, students here don't cross over into other programs. If you're a drama student, you only do drama, same with history, etc. So it's extra fun for the international students coming from liberal arts educations who have to dip into different areas of study. I am going to be sweating bullets this entire month.


In more theatrical news, I've seen three plays (not including mine) in the last few days. The first was a new play called Moment at the Bush Theatre. I went there because my playwrighting teacher told me it put on really great shows. I'd also heard of it many years ago because Keira Knightley's mother, paywright Sharman Macdonald, used to (and maybe still does) get her plays performed there. The play was good, though not as exciting as I would have liked, mostly because they told you the major plot point in the synopsis, and it made the revealing moment a lot less shocking. The acting, though, was top-notch, and the theatre was really intimate, only forty-five seats, so you were really in the thick of things.

The second play was The Shape of Things by Neil Labute. I hadn't even heard of this play before I came here, but in my second week or so here, Laura and I were talking about plays we love and she brought this one up, and she made it sound so good that when I went to Samuel French, I bought a copy of it. I loved it too, and when Laura found out it was playing here, we got tickets right away and saw it last night. It was pretty good. The theatre was located right next to a sex shop, which certainly made things interesting. It was a very small space and the audience sat on pillows on the floor, which was a little inconvenient if you were wearing a skirt, as both Laura and I were. At first I wasn't a fan of three of the four actors' acting, but they did warm up by the second act, and having read the play first, I can say that the way it's written is extremely difficult to get across. They all did great American accents, too, even holding onto them when they got emotional, which is when most people lose any kind of non-native accent (even in real life.)

Tonight, I saw Vernon God Little at the Young Vic Theatre for my RT class. I think this is one of the shows I like the least of what we've had to see. I did like it, but the plot got redundant at points. However, it was funny and sad and the acting was really great. It was set in Texas, and the actors all had really thick Southern drawls and they line-danced in the show while wearing cowboy hats and boots... you could just feel all of the Americans sinking down in their seats. I hope the British don't think we all act like that... It was very good, though, and I'm glad I saw it.

Oh, a tale from today- last night, Adrienne asked me if I wanted to go see the Book of the Dead at the British Museum. I said sure, and this morning she came in and said that you had to schedule a time to see it- she knew I was going to see a show, so did 3:45 work for me? I said yes, and a few hours later, we met up with Deanna and Megan to go to the museum. We stopped off at Primark (which is like a department store- sized K-Mart, but exclusively for clothes) and then went to the museum. As we were standing in line, I realised that they wanted you to present a pre-ticket paper, and that there were no tickets left otherwise. Everyone else had one and I did not. As it turns out, Adrienne and I got our signals crossed- I thought she was asking me if the time worked for me so she could reserve all four tickets, and she thought I had gotten mine, so I couldn't go in. She apologised profusely, even though it wasn't her fault- I shouldn't have assumed, and I left to go occupy myself with something else before the show.

I ended up getting some Starbucks, browsing a bookshop near the museum, then picking up some Pret a Manger and heading down the the area where the theatre was. I was still a few hours early, so I went into the BFI Film shop and got a cool poster and then hung out in the National Theatre bookshop for awhile. It was too cold to eat outside, so I sat in the National's lobby, reading and eating my dinner, and listened to the guy and girl next to me begin what I believe was their first-ever date, which was adorable. So though I didn't get to see the Book of the Dead, afternoons have certainly been spent in worse ways. I love London.