Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Metafictional Madness

Saturday, September 13, 2008

This morning, Leah, Tristan, Lauren Deitz, and I met to finalize tour information and itinerary. We went to Kensington Gardens about 45 minutes early to eat lunch and admire the view. It was a gorgeous day. I can’t imagine anyone being more enthusiastic about their tour than we were. For days we’d been researching and simply spewing facts and throwing quotes about. We relished every chance we got to reference faeries or flying or pirates. I can’t say our audience was as enthusiastic as we were. We began with a brief history of Kensington Gardens and how it came to be known as a place inhabited by faeries. Then we walked to the Peter Pan Statue and Leah discussed the statue itself and public reaction to it, etc. Tristan took us across the gardens, using his Liberty Cap skills to walk backwards while enlightening our group about the Llewellyn-Davis family and J.M. Barrie’s relation to them. It took a bit longer than expected to walk across the Gardens, and still longer to get to the Tube station, and even then it took forever for the right train to get there. Finally, we reached Embankment and walked up to see Barrie’s house, which is uninteresting in itself but served as the perfect platform for Leah to explain about Barrie’s personal life, his upbringing, his psychogenetic dwarfism, and his failed marriage. From there we walked up to the Duke of York’s Theatre, where Lauren gave us a brief history of Edwardian theatre and of Peter Pan as a show. Then took the Tube to Holborn and walked to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, where I talked about Barrie’s love of children and his gift of the Peter Pan royalties to the hospital and the subsequent copyright issues that have arisen over the years.. We ran about ten minutes over our two and a half hour limit, but (except travel time) we filled the time with information. I’m not sure how to read the reaction. Everyone seemed excited at the outset, but the walking tired people out by the end and they just seemed like they wanted to get it over with. Prof. Rudalevige seemed unimpressed, but he also isn’t a terribly emotional person. We’ll see.

Our group went back to the hotel and rested after the long walk. Then I went with Tristan and Leah to Sainsbury’s to get food. We had to rush back, eat, and get changed for the National Theatre. It was cruel to make us walk through the Thames Festival on our way to the theatre and not have opportunity to stop and watch. At the theatre we saw “A Slight Ache” and “Landscape,” two short plays by Harold Pinter. They were good, in the sort of obscure metafiction school. The first play reminded me of a short story I’ve read called “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Stacy Richter’s “The Cavemen in the Hedges.” Both these stories, like Pinter’s “A Slight Ache,” involved some element of the supernatural which the everyday people treat as if it is entirely normal. In the play, an elderly village couple with serious communication problems invites in a creepy, semi-supernatural matchstick man who has been standing outside their back gate for, presumably, a number of months. The husband invites him in to finally find out why the matchstick man has been standing there, but both he and his wife end up making up their own stories about him, imposing their fictional identities on him. Eventually the matchstick man and the husband switch places, and the final scene shows the husband lying unconscious on the floor with the matchstick man’s tray on his stomach while the wife and matchstick man walk off hand in hand. You could tell that everything in the play was a symbol or something, and that it had something to do with communication between this married couple.
The second play was just as bizarre, although more for its structure than its content. The woman was sitting downstage in a chair facing the audience, while the man was upstage left at the end of a long table, for the most part addressing the woman. This, I believe, also had something to do with communication. From the dialogue (if you can call it that) you learned that this couple was married, but not happily. They were both reminiscing about the good times, but the man was trying to coax the woman out of her stupor, and the woman was addressing the audience, telling the story of how she met her love (who we can only assume was the man in his younger days). I enjoyed both of the plays, but I don’t understand them.

On our way out, we went down to the beach of the Thames, where it seemed like a beach rave was being held, but it ended not long after we got there. I really wanted to stay. Even with the music gone, there were a lot of people and it seemed like a lot of fun, but everyone else was tired and still had to work on their project. Oh well. I’ll go tomorrow night. I’m due for some fun.

1 comment:

Erica said...

Faeries!
I'm craving faeries these days.