Today was pretty good day for us, and a pretty good day for England! I’ll explain that last part a bit later.
We had coffee and pastries as usual with Vicki and Jerry as we plotted out our day. Their deck overlooking the Brent River is absolutely one of my favorite spots in England. The weather has been unseasonably hot for London as it was last week in France. Fortunately, London is just a few degrees cooler than the Rhone Valley, so it seems just a bit more like normal Los Angeles summer weather to us. Vicki drove us up to the Northfields tube station where we caught the tube. It wouldn’t seem like a trip to England without at least one trip with that calm voice saying over and over again, “This is a Piccadilly Line service to Cockfosters.” John amused himself by taking pictures of people on the train.
We got off at Leicester Square and headed towards the TKTS booth. We wanted to go to the matinee of An Ideal Husband and I was sure that we could get the tickets for the show cheaper than buying them online. As it turned out, the discount was not that great and we only saved about 10 pounds this way. I suspect that the internet has somewhat undercut the role of the last minute ticket sales offices in places like New York and London. But I have bought so many tickets to shows there over the last thirty years that it seems almost wrong to pay a visit to London without looking at the listings on the board — now, alas, electronic — on the booth in Leicester Square.
John was not feeling his best, and I figured that some lunch might be in order. We decided to have at the Peter Jones department store in Sloan Square. John and I hopped on a double decker bus and enjoyed the sights as it went down Regent Street and Piccadilly, past Green Park and the Wellington Arch, and through Knightsbridge. I have no idea why I did not take some pictures here as John managed to grab the front seats on the upper deck.
The attraction of the Peter Jones store is certainly not the building itself, a rather ugly bit of concrete, glass, and steel that jarring contrasts with the red brick and terra cotta of the Victorian buildings that surround the rest of the square. The appeal is the view from the cafeteria on the sixth floor.
The food is decent for cafeteria fare. They offer salads and things like that, but you know when you’re in England you just need to be a little old school sometimes and order fish and chips or the bangers and mash!
We were running a little late, so we ordered an Uber rather than trying to mess about the the tube. John has fascinated by the elephants that were a temporary art installation on the square.
Our afternoon performance was Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Vaudeville Theatre on The Strand. Once again, I seem to have forgotten to take some pictures here, so this is one borrowed from some London theater website.
You will notice is that picture that the play is The Importance of Being Earnest. This theater has done new performances of all of Wilde’s plays as its season this year. I am rather sorry I was not there to how they adapted De Profundis for the stage. Nevertheless, I was definitely curious to see what they would make of An Ideal Husband. The play is something of a mess. The plot is rather complicated even by the standards of the time. It concerns Sir Robert Chiltern, a wealthy, Liberal member of Parliament, considered one of the most morally upright members of the House of Commons. At a dinner party at his home, Mrs. Cheverly, an English woman who now lives on the continent, approaches Sir Robert and asks him for his support of a canal scheme in Argentina. Sir Robert tells her that he considers this scheme basically a fraud, and that he cannot support it. She tells him that if he does not she will publish a letter revealing the source of his wealth. Many years earlier Sir Robert had sold a wealthy Austrian a Cabinet secret, telling him to buy stock in the Suez Canal company three days before the British government announced its purchase. Not only would revealing this secret destroy Sir Robert’s career, but Sir Robert knows that his wife Gertrude would be devastated to learn that he was ever dishonest. Lord Goring, a dandy obviously based on Wilde himself, manages through a series of rather farcical scenes to obtain the Mrs. Cheverly’s letter and save Sir Robert’s from ruin. Along the way, though, Gertrude has to learn not only to forgive her husband for not being morally perfect, but she herself is caught in a situation that could appear compromising. The play is generally considered a comedy, but all the real energy comes in the scenes dealing with blackmail and secrets. This was obviously stuff that Wilde knew and understood well.
The cast at the Vaudeville did an great job with this material. Lord Goring and his father were played by a real son and father, Freddie and Edward Fox. The latter is one of the most distinguished of British stage actors, and he brought both humor and gravitas to an fairly minor role. Frances Barber was a great Lady Cheverly, though she is considerably older than Sally Bretton, who played Sir Robert’s wife, so it seemed hard to think of them as former school mates. I will admit that the casting of Faith Omole, a black actress, as Mabel, Sir Robert’s sister, seemed a little jarring in a production that otherwise was could have been the original staging of the play. She was, however, quite good in the role.
From The Strand we made our way across the Thames to the South Bank. Vicki had arranged for us to have dinner at the Wagamama near the Royal Festival Hall. It was quite a busy scene down there this evening. After that, we walked over to the old County Hall building to see Witness for the Prosecution. Built between 1911 and 1922, this impressively large edifice was the center of London government for about 60 years. But in 1986, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, tired of the resistance of its policies by the Great London Council and “Red Ken” Livingston, the mayor of London, abolished London regional government and transferred its powers to the various borough councils. For the past 25 years the building has been largely empty although sections of it have been converted to a hotel and various tourist attractions.
For this performance, the old council chamber had been converted into a courtroom of sorts. A thrust stage had been constructed in the center of the room below the the dais.
A few of the seats were designated as the jury box and the people sitting there were asked to serve as a jury of sorts (though, if you know the story, they had to find the defendant not guilty). The play followed the movie pretty carefully and probably the book as well, though I will be honest enough to admit I have never read any Agatha Christie. The actors were all fine, though I do not think anybody could top Marlene Dietrich’s performance as the loyal, then vengeful, wife. But the audience really enjoyed that show, as I did, too.
Now the reason that Jerry did not come with us that evening was that this was a big day in the World Cup when England was playing Columbia. Even though football was invented in England, the English team is famously bad. Nobody expected them to advance very far, but after beating Tunisia and Panama, England was father along in the World Cup than it had been in many, many years. Lots of people, including, oddly enough me, kept checking phones surreptitiously during the play to check on the score. For most of the game England held a 1-0 lead, but right as the clock was about to run out, Columbia tied the game. It was in the penalty phase as we left County Hall. People clustered around a little television to watch.
And then, England scored and won the game. Everybody started cheering!
In a few days, England will now play Sweden in the semi-finals. More immediately, tomorrow is my birthday and our last full day in the United Kingdom. Almost time to go home.
