outings

Over the past few weeks I have made more of an effort, consciously of by accidental convenience to get out and do more with the limited spare time I have.

Last week I headed to the Royal Albert Hall for the Proms. The New York Philharmonic was playing Tchaikovskii, which can never go wrong, really. For one thing, the building itself is great. The Hall was designed by Captain Francis Fowke and Major-General Henry Y.D. Scott and built by Lucas Brothers. The designers were heavily influenced by ancient amphitheatres, and it shows. The place looks vaguely like a Roman Coliseum, with a huge organ in the middle. The acoustics of the building are actually not the best, but the setting makes up for it. I sat at the top, and thus got an excellent overview of everyone else. Unfortunately I didn’t take opera glasses, I would have had the best people watching post in London if I had.

Then this week I headed to Southbank to catch a multimedia rendition of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Ok, I admit I have never been a Virginia Woolf fan. I partly blame my secondary school teachers for this, having been forced to read A Room of One’s Own, which I detested, in the 10th class. i think my general dislike also stems from a great mistrust of anything that suggests feminism, to which I have a vague allergy.

Those hesitations aside, the production was technically very well done. The Waves is a saturated and self- aware work, which it has been argued, represents a high-modernist destruction and reconstruction of the concept of the novel. Presented as a play, it comes across as a radio serial form an earlier era more than a standard script. The monologues are typically Woolf, interior free associating monologues with complex vocabulary. The characters are caricatures of themselves, with each fulfilling his inevitable destiny, and the man around whom much of the action revolves, Percival, is left voiceless, uttering not a word of his own throughout the performance. The actors and choreography were amazing. Minute detail was paid to every sound and image, creating an acute impact on the senses. The timing was impeccable and the mis-en-scene incredibly striking, accurately reflecting the obsessions of the modernist mindset. Various microphones planted around the stage captured every little twitch and rustle, while cameras also projected onto a screen emotionally vivid images at well-chosen moments. Technically the play was perfect. I thank God I was not born a member of the English upper middle class at the turn of the century, as more emotionally repressed environment I could not imagine. Still don’t think I will ever be a major Virginia Woolf fan though, something about her writing just makes my skin crawl.