Sun-up was at 7:56 this morning according to the BBC weather site, and we are having our first foggy morning of the season. The skyscraper tower of the Royal Free Hospital two blocks away — considered a blight by Hampsteaders — is not visible from the dining room window at the moment. These foggy days are a prelude to Christmas every year. A new weather front is dropping the temperature every day, and for the next few mornings we can expect freezing fog to linger. The sidewalks — I can never remember they are called pavements here — will be wet and slick; the damp air will penetrate the woolen defenses of scarves, hats, and gloves, making the temperature seem much colder than it really is.
As the atmospheric fog drops, the fog of my eternal head cold seems to be lifting. The week after my return from the States, I never left the house except to buy some head cold medication. I just slept and worked on breathing. Fortunately, there were no dates to remember on my calendar. This week has been a gradual entrance back into the swing of living in London.
I hosted a quilt group pot-luck lunch on Monday and attended one on Thursday. The Monday group always holds the pot-luck lunch here because we have more Christmas decorations than anyone else. Most of the group members are ex-pats living in rented and often furnished flats who will only be here for the months or years of their husband's overseas assignment, so naturally they haven't brought the family decorations from home. I usually welcome the party to unpack our beloved Christmas decorations, but I am afraid last weekend I made a rather half-hearted effort, so I have to finish the job this weekend. Alas, we have another year in which the storage box of Christmas themed fabrics has not been touched. The old "Christmas in July" craft magazine promotions need to be revived. Speaking of magazines, Borders bookstores in the UK are closing down, so my easy access to US magazines is now closed off. Borders US expanded to the UK shortly after we moved to London, but was sold off a few years ago to a UK private equity group and then to a management buyout, but Waterstones has the high streets sewn up having bought up all the other high street chains. Borders opened up some huge US-size bookstores around the country. Those empty spaces are going to make big holes in shopping districts.
I loved seeing Megan's Sanctimommy photos of decorating Hingham. Some are ones she grew up with and requested when she and Barnz chose to have Christmas on their own. It has been nine years since we spent Christmas with Megan. I would never ever want young children to spend Christmas away from home. I still have memories of a Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in Washington, D.C. with two little girls deeply worried the Easter Bunny would not be able to find them for basket delivery room service. (He did.) As of yesterday however, I have formed a new holiday plan. In a few years, I want Megan and the children to come for a visit the week after Christmas so, as dual citizens, they can experience an important cultural component of their English nationality: the theatre. The English live and breathe theatre, unlike Americans who have very little access to theatre productions unless they live in New York with money to spare. Outside of New York, there is the one professional repertory theatre in big cities, the non-professional drama club in small cities, and the ubiquitous high school musical. I wonder if high schools even put on plays any more. My high school had the annual musical plus a Junior Class Play and a Senior Class Play where we were introduced to classics like Blithe Spirit and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Hingham High School had a vaunted drama program, but after the annual autumn musical, all I remember being invited to see was the 15 minute entry into the all-important Massachusetts High School Drama Competition, which recognises technics and techniques, but offers no appreciation of drama as art.
Yesterday, when an English friend with a three year-old granddaughter listed the number of performances they had already attended with her and how many more were coming up, I realised the national love of drama begins with the pantomime season at Christmas. Time Out magazine lists 27 productions under the Children's Theatre heading in this week's issue. They include The Cat in the Hat at the National Theatre directed by Katie Mitchell (a very hot young director), The Enchanted Pig, an opera by Jonathan Dove at the Royal Opera House, and The Forest at the Young Vic. Then there are the annual productions based on beloved story books, Raymond Brigg's The Snowman told in dance (suitable for age 2+ to start them really young), Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, and a new production of her book Stick Man. The year-round children's theatres, the Polka, the Angel, the Unicorn, have seasonal productions too. So of course I want my grandchildren to come here to spend a week attending the theatre every day. When they outgrow the children's productions they will graduate to the adult panto productions. Fairy tales told with an edge of sexual innuendo and cross-dressing with B-list celebrities, popular stars of past decades, soap opera stars, and reality TV competition winners and losers in the special roles. We went to a few high-class pantos — Angela Carter's posthumous Cinderella — years ago, but looking through the listings, perhaps we need to book a real panto this year.
Every year in the weeks before Christmas we book so many Christmas concerts, there is no room for anything else. Looking at my calendar I see six concerts coming up over the next two weeks. Speaking of music, I am surrounded by stacks of CDs — our collection of Christmas music (minus the extensive, but outdated collections of LPs and tapes) that Bob has been using to write his review of favourite Christmas music available on Bazzfazz (11 parts) and on Scholars and Rogues, which has 14 parts. A Big Day in Hingham was the day the Atlantic Wire website picked up Part 4 from Scholars and Rogues. I can't find the actual link because my computer is not picking up links very quickly right now, but the Atlantic Wire bills itself as "tracking the most influential opinion makers," and on the night in question, everyone else on The Ticker was indeed someone notable from their 50 most important pundits list. I feel the title of Bob's post, which included the words "Medieval Babes" had something to do with its selection by an A-list political site with cultural pretensions. Megan and Barnz, who can do these things, captured a "screen shot" so we have a record of this event on Bob's laptop.
In addition to the two pot-luck lunches, I went to two book groups this week. My regular "Sevens" group read Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, a book I did not like in the 1980s when I first read it, and which I found I still don't like when I reread it earlier this week, although I keep reading that I should like it as it is some sort of classic. The group was split on opinion, but those who liked it kept citing the magnificent prose, which is usually the reason given to call it a classic. One thing I don't like is the writing style which I found made up of oddly patched and overblown phrasing. Our moderator found an interview in which Robinson said she began writing and saving metaphors when she was doing a graduate degree on Shakespeare, and later she realised she had the voice of Ruth in her random collection. In other words, she did patch together the prose.
The second book group was an extra meeting of the "Literary Ladies" to meet Ruth Waterman, the author of When Swan Lake Comes to Sarajevo. Ruth is an English violinist who studied at Julliard and lived in New York for years before returning to England. In 2002 she was invited to guest conduct the Mostar Sinfonietta in Bosnia. She returned to Bosnia to lead concerts in 2004, 2005, and 2006, when funding for the orchestra ran out. As a BBC contract presenter, the BBC gave her recording tape and suggested a radio show if she found any interesting material. She collected personal experiences of the devastating war years from her young orchestra members that were used for a Radio 4 programme, and ultimately for this book. I bought the book from her, so haven't read it yet, but she played excerpts from the voices of the musicians and discussed the sadly deteriorating situation in Bosnia at the moment. The meeting was heightened by a visiting friend of a member who told of her escape to Rio de Janiero from Bosnia with her 9 year-old daughter after, as she said, "my mother's body was found in the river and my grandmother was killed." She is also a violinist, explaining she was in Bosnia when the war began because she had returned from living in Paris when asked to represent Bosnia in an international competition, and told us of her desperation when her only chance to stay in Rio was by securing a seat in the city's symphony orchestra. The room certainly went silent as she told her story, giving us an inkling of what Ruth went through when survivors poured out their experiences.
Finally, we went to a gallery opening of a print exhibition organised by the husband of a quilting friend. David is an artist and designer, and his design has been chosen by the Royal Mail for the Olympic Sports series of stamps issued earlier this year. David's stamp is for Badminton. To celebrate he invited other stamp designers to exhibit their work as prints made by Epson photocopiers. What a great show. The link to the ROA Gallery lets you see the wonderful work on display. We chose at least a dozen. Next week we will have to hone our choice down to Christmas gift level.
At last I feel like I am back into the routine of life. Tomorrow we get our tree, and I begin to organise what needs doing between now and the New Year. We haven't even caught up on the Advent Calendars. Christmas is only two weeks away!!
Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Friday night we went to see the new play Enron at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Finance is the theme for this year's drama season and Enron is universally agreed to be the best of the bunch. The playwright, Lucy Prebble, is in her mid-20s with an amazing talent for mixing both humour and sober wisdom in telling this morality tale for the age we live in. I'm not sure whether I had ever heard of Enron before their collapse and the ensuing scandal. Living outside the US in the age of the internet means that you can easily keep up with the main news stories and with the stories that shouldn't be featured stories like Balloon Boy, but you start missing the under-stories, the nuances, the spins, the frequency of repeats that turn a story into "conventional wisdom." In 2001, I'm sure I was shocked not only by Enron's transgressions, but also shocked to learn how admired the company had been for its innovations in achieving success. Those innovations are carefully explained: mark to market accounting — why wait to enjoy a profit that could be spent before it exists; "off-balance sheet vehicles," the offloading of debt from the books by creating an infinite number of companies to hide the debt — played here as raptors who crawl around the stage chomping on a fodder of debt. Singing and dancing financial analysts break into song to celebrate, and Arthur Anderson — remember them — auditors are cowed into agreement as the party goes on and on.
The play connects the Enron debacle directly to the US and its culture of huckster marketing that is thought to be uniquely American, at least in England and more broadly in Europe. When we moved to London eleven years ago, I was struck by negative references to the States as a place where everything is for sale and only valued if it has a good price attached. Having always lived in the States, I had never thought the incessant marketing of everything was a strange custom. My ex-pat friend Martha is always wondering why there are never any T-shirts for sale at special events here because they could make a killing. Martha was really bummed this summer when she went to Hampton Court Palace for the celebration of Henry VIII's accession to the throne 500 years ago, and there were no commemorative T-shirts to buy! I think we can all agree, such an event would never be T-shirtless in the US. When we were in Massachusetts last June for ten days, I think Bob bought six T-shirts at various events and places. Except in the T-shirt arena, England is always trying to American-ise by choosing and emulating the worst of our cultural sins, but there is always a great deal of angst involved before the difficult decisions are finally reluctantly accepted as necessary. The most recent example I remember is a decision to allow "product placement" on TV shows. Whenever and whoever came up with this moneymaking idea in the US, never had a moment of moral qualm to disturb the dollars he was counting off in his dreams. This article from last month's Guardian gives a flavour of the counter arguments and the politics involved here in such a decision, despite the real bottom line issue being the independent TV stations need bailing out. The BBC stations of course still have no advertising ever which is wonderful (except when you need a bathroom break while watching a riveting show, and you go damn, this is on BBC . . .).
Enron, the play, has lots of Texas references and the Stars and Stripes waving to drive home the message that this is a born and bred American smash-up. There was a brief scene of the 2000 election night and the disputed Florida vote count that hit me like a gut punch. Fortunately it was a very brief scene, but for a moment my stomach heaved at being reminded of that awful time. Bob and I were in the States for Thanksgiving that year when the despicable decision had not yet been rendered by the Supreme Court. I still can't believe the Supreme Court created the nightmare of the Bush years — well they are only responsible for the first term — and the legacy that continues. As Enron moves to its final scenes, the ironic humour tails off and the morality tale takes over. The kicker is that there is no morality in the tale. The little people lose everything; the big guys cash in. The big kahuna dies, so conveniently for his wife who is apparently struggling on the $13 million she has left to live on, and some go to jail, ho hum, undoubtedly to emerge as lifestyle gurus to the masses.
Enron collapsed nearly ten years ago, and no lessons were learned. Earlier this year mark to market accounting was legitimised. Just go Google "off-balance sheet vehicles" to get a glimpse of how this strategy post-Enron helped create the current financial crisis, and more worryingly how it is still being used to hide the lurking toxic waste in the financial system. As the play ends, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling madly offers his tribute to The Market, the engine that moves the universe forward, the glue that binds us because self-interest allows us to, counter-intuitively, trust one another motives. Finally in front of a graph of the market's rise and fall, he points out that bubbles produced the railroads, the industrial revolution, the internet, and that future bubbles will be needed to save the environment, to save the world. All well and good if earlier bubbles produced the modern age of wealth and leisure, tragically, the recent bubbles have done nothing of the sort. Fortunes were amassed, although few remain intact since most were only balance sheets assets, but where were the investments in the future. Instead of wealth distribution, factories were shut down and jobs out-sourced; simultaneously cutting taxes and starting expensive wars depleted public coffers and limited public services; health, transport, and communication systems trail behind the rest of the developed world. As we all now know, Jeff Skilling was not the smartest guy in the room, and it's time to give up the fantasy that The Market will solve all problems.
On Sunday we moved on to a real hero of his time. The British Library is celebrating 1000 years of Beowulf — admittedly they don't make very clear what exactly happened in 1009 to make this birthday happen! The only existing manuscript is on display in the Treasures Gallery at the Library. Click on the link, and then click on the picture link to see a page. The link also explains how it was almost lost in an 18th century fire (and how you can buy related Beowulf items. I wonder if there is a T-shirt?).
Sunday afternoon we heard the phenomenal Benjamin Bagby recite the Grendel legend with his 6-string harp. Bagby specialises in very early medieval music. His group Sequentia, founded with the late Barbara Thornton, were the leaders in promoting the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who had a bit of a revival a few years ago after 900 years of obscurity. His website includes a clip of a performance, which he seems to do quite regularly. At the British Library auditorium, a blue screen behind him, ran the modern English lines, as he sang and played. Tonight he will be back with Seamus Heaney who will recite his version. Poor Bob is home from work today with a cold, so I'm afraid he won't be able to go.
The play connects the Enron debacle directly to the US and its culture of huckster marketing that is thought to be uniquely American, at least in England and more broadly in Europe. When we moved to London eleven years ago, I was struck by negative references to the States as a place where everything is for sale and only valued if it has a good price attached. Having always lived in the States, I had never thought the incessant marketing of everything was a strange custom. My ex-pat friend Martha is always wondering why there are never any T-shirts for sale at special events here because they could make a killing. Martha was really bummed this summer when she went to Hampton Court Palace for the celebration of Henry VIII's accession to the throne 500 years ago, and there were no commemorative T-shirts to buy! I think we can all agree, such an event would never be T-shirtless in the US. When we were in Massachusetts last June for ten days, I think Bob bought six T-shirts at various events and places. Except in the T-shirt arena, England is always trying to American-ise by choosing and emulating the worst of our cultural sins, but there is always a great deal of angst involved before the difficult decisions are finally reluctantly accepted as necessary. The most recent example I remember is a decision to allow "product placement" on TV shows. Whenever and whoever came up with this moneymaking idea in the US, never had a moment of moral qualm to disturb the dollars he was counting off in his dreams. This article from last month's Guardian gives a flavour of the counter arguments and the politics involved here in such a decision, despite the real bottom line issue being the independent TV stations need bailing out. The BBC stations of course still have no advertising ever which is wonderful (except when you need a bathroom break while watching a riveting show, and you go damn, this is on BBC . . .).
Enron, the play, has lots of Texas references and the Stars and Stripes waving to drive home the message that this is a born and bred American smash-up. There was a brief scene of the 2000 election night and the disputed Florida vote count that hit me like a gut punch. Fortunately it was a very brief scene, but for a moment my stomach heaved at being reminded of that awful time. Bob and I were in the States for Thanksgiving that year when the despicable decision had not yet been rendered by the Supreme Court. I still can't believe the Supreme Court created the nightmare of the Bush years — well they are only responsible for the first term — and the legacy that continues. As Enron moves to its final scenes, the ironic humour tails off and the morality tale takes over. The kicker is that there is no morality in the tale. The little people lose everything; the big guys cash in. The big kahuna dies, so conveniently for his wife who is apparently struggling on the $13 million she has left to live on, and some go to jail, ho hum, undoubtedly to emerge as lifestyle gurus to the masses.
Enron collapsed nearly ten years ago, and no lessons were learned. Earlier this year mark to market accounting was legitimised. Just go Google "off-balance sheet vehicles" to get a glimpse of how this strategy post-Enron helped create the current financial crisis, and more worryingly how it is still being used to hide the lurking toxic waste in the financial system. As the play ends, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling madly offers his tribute to The Market, the engine that moves the universe forward, the glue that binds us because self-interest allows us to, counter-intuitively, trust one another motives. Finally in front of a graph of the market's rise and fall, he points out that bubbles produced the railroads, the industrial revolution, the internet, and that future bubbles will be needed to save the environment, to save the world. All well and good if earlier bubbles produced the modern age of wealth and leisure, tragically, the recent bubbles have done nothing of the sort. Fortunes were amassed, although few remain intact since most were only balance sheets assets, but where were the investments in the future. Instead of wealth distribution, factories were shut down and jobs out-sourced; simultaneously cutting taxes and starting expensive wars depleted public coffers and limited public services; health, transport, and communication systems trail behind the rest of the developed world. As we all now know, Jeff Skilling was not the smartest guy in the room, and it's time to give up the fantasy that The Market will solve all problems.
On Sunday we moved on to a real hero of his time. The British Library is celebrating 1000 years of Beowulf — admittedly they don't make very clear what exactly happened in 1009 to make this birthday happen! The only existing manuscript is on display in the Treasures Gallery at the Library. Click on the link, and then click on the picture link to see a page. The link also explains how it was almost lost in an 18th century fire (and how you can buy related Beowulf items. I wonder if there is a T-shirt?).
Sunday afternoon we heard the phenomenal Benjamin Bagby recite the Grendel legend with his 6-string harp. Bagby specialises in very early medieval music. His group Sequentia, founded with the late Barbara Thornton, were the leaders in promoting the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who had a bit of a revival a few years ago after 900 years of obscurity. His website includes a clip of a performance, which he seems to do quite regularly. At the British Library auditorium, a blue screen behind him, ran the modern English lines, as he sang and played. Tonight he will be back with Seamus Heaney who will recite his version. Poor Bob is home from work today with a cold, so I'm afraid he won't be able to go.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
A rainy night at The Globe (and broccoli)
The broccoli problem has been solved by blogging and the internet. Last week I signed up for an e-mail feed from the award winning food blog 101 Cookbooks (www.101cookbooks.com) out of San Francisco, and the first message came through yesterday with a recipe for broccoli pesto for when you have much too much broccoli on hand. Bob and I are big fans of pureed broccoli so I am optimistic. Yesterday I referred to the gourmet-foodie wasteland of the Highland Park, New Jersey years. That wasn't completely honest, I did buy a broccoliflower at Foodtown once, and my daughters still joke about the awfulness of that occasion. They also agree that my single stab at 1980s gourmet-foodie trendiness was the most horrible thing I ever tried to make them eat. I don't know if the recipe was actually from the Silver Palate cookbooks, but there were no fancy ingredients in pureed broccoli, just the veg, some, butter, some cream, and a Cuisinart. You can still say "pureed broccoli" to my grown daughters, and they will pretend gag and say "the colour, the awful colour. . ." Thus ended my attempts at trendy cooking. But children do grow up, and they leave home, and one night here in London a few years ago, with some broccoli on hand, I remembered that wonderful pure taste and lovely deep green colour. The butter, cream (now thick and organic from Riverford Farms), and the Cuisinart (well not the same one) were still on hand, and now we often eat our broccoli pureed. Since I am talking rather endlessly about broccoli, I will mention that the trick to cooking it is to way way oversalt the boiling water, then just bring it back to the boil for the shortest time. I learned this by accident of course, probably forgetting the first two times I had put salt in the water, but a few years ago, I was paging through cooking god Thomas Keller's French Laundry cookbook in a bookshop, and found him writing along the lines of: the trick of cooking broccoli is to use more salt than you think possible in the boiling water -- So I don't want to hear any of the faux-health advice from people who regard salt as the enemy of civilisation. (Especially since it is the saviour of civilisation being a sure way to preserve food for the "starving season" of whatever ecoclimate in which one is subsisting.) I don't eat processed food except for obvious junk treats (mmm Doritos and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, now easily available in England), so I control my salt intake, and I have no qualms about oversalting the things that taste great (to me) when salty: mashed potatoes, French fries, macaroni and cheese.
London is such a cultural cornucopia, we could find an event or two every night of the year. In practice, we attend events in waves. We purchase tickets for a dozen or more events, become exhausted by the cultural input, spend a period of time watching worthless, but entertaining US TV programmes (Bones, Heroes, NCIS, CSI), agree that since we live in London watching this stuff is ridiculous, buy another round of tickets, and let the cycle begin again. August is always a buy-tickets season for us, as the programmes for next season are delivered, and newspapers announce the must-sees. So last night our cultural season opened with a trip to the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. Now the Globe is not one of my favourite places. Partly this stems from the first production I saw with Megan on holiday, the summer before we moved to London. It was the theatre's first season, and they were attempting to do Shakespeare's whole 5 acts with an interval between each act. We left somewhere in the middle of Act 4, I believe. I'm not sure if they were yet renting cushions for the hard wooden backless benches, but the event was more painful than enjoyable. I hadn't been back for a dramatic performance since then. Bob has developed an interest in Thomas Paine, reading Paine's work and a biography of the man. Paine is a bit of an anomalous figure here. He was a heroic figure in two earth-shaking revolutions, but we are in England after all, and England was on the opposite side of both those revolutions, which makes Paine kind of a terrorist and traitor. I say kind of because the opposition party Whigs were supporters of American independence so they agreed with Paine, even if the government didn't. It was the French Revolution and Edmund Burke that did in Paine's reputation in his native land. Last year, in an interview in The Guardian, Richard Attenborough discussed his decades long quest to make a film on Paine. Over the summer, Bob saw that Attenborough's scriptwriter had turned his script into a play to be performed at the Globe. As we found our way over to the Globe the light rain turned into a slightly heavier rain and as the play began, the slightly heavier rain turned into a raging downpour. Our seats (yes uncomfortable backless benches) were under the roof, but the pit audience, and the actors who performed their parts in the pit, were drenched. When the wind gusted the plastic bag raincoats provided to the pit audience all crinkled at the same time. And of course Shakespeare did not have to contend with the flight path to Heathrow overhead. Cute idea rebuilding a mock-up of the Globe, not sure it's very practical, but the tourists seem to love it, so who am I to be negative. Sadly the play was not very good, lots of running around, lots of extraneous plot points such as the women he bedded, but not a lot of explanation of why he was important. Since much of the audience was probably American, perhaps they knew what Common Sense was and what it meant, but the brief mention of its publication hardly did the work justice. We were trapped for three hours, so there was enough time to offer a little more substance. In London fashion, the three hours of heavy rain ended as the play finished, allowing us a lovely walk across the once-wobbly Millennium Bridge to the Tube and home before midnight.
London is such a cultural cornucopia, we could find an event or two every night of the year. In practice, we attend events in waves. We purchase tickets for a dozen or more events, become exhausted by the cultural input, spend a period of time watching worthless, but entertaining US TV programmes (Bones, Heroes, NCIS, CSI), agree that since we live in London watching this stuff is ridiculous, buy another round of tickets, and let the cycle begin again. August is always a buy-tickets season for us, as the programmes for next season are delivered, and newspapers announce the must-sees. So last night our cultural season opened with a trip to the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare's theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. Now the Globe is not one of my favourite places. Partly this stems from the first production I saw with Megan on holiday, the summer before we moved to London. It was the theatre's first season, and they were attempting to do Shakespeare's whole 5 acts with an interval between each act. We left somewhere in the middle of Act 4, I believe. I'm not sure if they were yet renting cushions for the hard wooden backless benches, but the event was more painful than enjoyable. I hadn't been back for a dramatic performance since then. Bob has developed an interest in Thomas Paine, reading Paine's work and a biography of the man. Paine is a bit of an anomalous figure here. He was a heroic figure in two earth-shaking revolutions, but we are in England after all, and England was on the opposite side of both those revolutions, which makes Paine kind of a terrorist and traitor. I say kind of because the opposition party Whigs were supporters of American independence so they agreed with Paine, even if the government didn't. It was the French Revolution and Edmund Burke that did in Paine's reputation in his native land. Last year, in an interview in The Guardian, Richard Attenborough discussed his decades long quest to make a film on Paine. Over the summer, Bob saw that Attenborough's scriptwriter had turned his script into a play to be performed at the Globe. As we found our way over to the Globe the light rain turned into a slightly heavier rain and as the play began, the slightly heavier rain turned into a raging downpour. Our seats (yes uncomfortable backless benches) were under the roof, but the pit audience, and the actors who performed their parts in the pit, were drenched. When the wind gusted the plastic bag raincoats provided to the pit audience all crinkled at the same time. And of course Shakespeare did not have to contend with the flight path to Heathrow overhead. Cute idea rebuilding a mock-up of the Globe, not sure it's very practical, but the tourists seem to love it, so who am I to be negative. Sadly the play was not very good, lots of running around, lots of extraneous plot points such as the women he bedded, but not a lot of explanation of why he was important. Since much of the audience was probably American, perhaps they knew what Common Sense was and what it meant, but the brief mention of its publication hardly did the work justice. We were trapped for three hours, so there was enough time to offer a little more substance. In London fashion, the three hours of heavy rain ended as the play finished, allowing us a lovely walk across the once-wobbly Millennium Bridge to the Tube and home before midnight.
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