The Week That Flew By

In my continued efforts to catch up on all the events…I have yet again fallen behind. Either I neglect my blog or my own personal journal; this is a dilemma I have yet to find a solution for…So to continue on where we previously left off. I last left you with the adventures I encountered in Dover, so we will begin the following day, 17 October 2011.

It is a typical Monday in London. I get to sleep in a tad and kind of meander about until two o’clock when I have Shakespeare class. Now class was not memorable, but the class outing that evening was. We attended a play this evening, and it had a very prominent star in its cast. Ralph Fiennes was Prospero in The Tempest. Ralph Fiennes??? Where should you know him from? Well I will clue you in…he is a romantic in Maid in Manhattan, evil in Schindler’s List, a Duke in The Duchess, and probably what he is most famous for recently is his role as Voldemort in Harry Potter. In the play we saw he did not look as creepy as he does in Harry Potter though, he does have a nose, real eyes, and actual lips. Now where to begin with analyzing this play…hmmm…well the acting was amazing in my opinion and I enjoyed listening to the speeches. However, the production as a whole was very different from anything we have yet seen. The producer of the play has been a producer of musicals for quite some time now, and he created a Shakespeare musical form of The Tempest. When watching the show you would forget you are watching Shakespeare because the emphasis was not on the beauty of the words written, but instead on the lighting, sound effects and creating musical dancing numbers within the actual written play. I would have loved to see the same actors put on a minimalist set like at The Globe Theatre.

Tuesday and Wednesday are days spent in Hoxton, one of my favourite areas of the city, since it provides more of a small town feel in the incredibly large city of London. Outside of my internship I was eagerly trying to get ready for Fall Break by doing laundry, contacting the car rental company to ensure that everything would go smoothly and trying to figure out how to pack a whole week’s worth of warm clothing into a backpack. The solution to this dilemma was to wear the majority of my bulky clothing and pack the smaller layers.

That was probably the quickest overview of a week I could possibly do. But next up is the adventures Fall Break provided for our crew...some are good while others induced tears...