A Semester in London: Our First Week in London

D.W. Gregory with the cast of Radium Girls

We have had an exciting first week. On the day the students arrived we met D.W. Gregory the playwright of Radium Girls in the crypt of St. Martin's of the Field church in Trafalgar Square. (See Picture to the right) We saw Mid Summer Night's Dream at the Globe for Theatre in London class. Samuel Beckett's five short plays in an evening called Fragments at the Young Vic Theatre directed by Peter Brook. Looking forward to our discussion on these plays in the Page to Stage class. I went to see Sam Shepard's new play, Kicking a Dead Horse that he directed at the Almeida Theatre. The students will see it on Saturday. Tonight we are going to see Merry Wives of Winsor at the Globe. The Thames Festival is today all along the river. We will attend and work our way to the Globe for tonight's show. Check out the short video clip of Dolores Gregory at the crypt.

I am giving over the blog to some of the students.

Hey this is Danielle, Shannon, Michelle, Amber and Peter. Since our first day here we've been having a blast. We got off the plane unpacked and went to meet the playwright of Radium Girls. We went to the Crypt at St. Martin of the Fields church and having, what else but true English tea. The building was brick, when it got later they would put candles on tables which really added to the atmosphere. We had a good time talking to Dolores. We got a chance to ask her questions about the setting, character, and any other questions we had to make our production better.

The next day we went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Globe. When we got off the tube stop, we were walking along Southwark Bridge when we first saw The Globe, all of us got excited and couldn't wait to be the first in line to be the Groundlings (standing seats in The Globe closest to the stage). We then got ready to rush the stage to get the closest standing spots. The show was amazing, everything was amazing. The interesting thing about the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was that two hours before the performance something happened to the actor playing Puck, he would not be performing. There was a note on the enterance to the theatre stating that someone else would be filling in and that he would have a script in hand for the production. During the prolouge Peter Quince came out and told us that The Globe doesn't have enough funding to hire understudies so someone else in the cast would have to perform instead. A lot of us were pretty upset, but when he walked on stage we completly forgot that he had a script in hand; he was AMAZING! It was a great performance. Later we found out that the "new" Puck only had two hours to get ready for his big role. He originally was a fairy and because something happened to the original puck he got the chance to take the stage in a leading role. So never get disheartend if you have a small role, you never know what can happen. You might get the chance of a lifetime.

Saint Mary's students at the Globe

A fast recap (more details later)...

We also saw Fragments at the Young Vic. We were all very excited to find that the one female player was a character from the latest Harry Potter movie. For most of us, it was our first time seeing absurdist theatre. Some of the short plays were as dark as we imagined them to be, but there were others that were really funny! Lots of humor; it was great to see on stage.

We've also been able to see some other shows on our own. We went to a music club in Notting Hill to see a friend of Gary's, Nassau Royal (Dave Ross), perform. Great acoustic music; fun bloke to talk to. You can google his name to find his myspace and hear his original music. He plans on attending our show.