M.O.A.I. doth sway my life...

thus says Malvolio, who was surprisingly fun and innovative in the play we saw tonight. But I'm skipping ahead. ;)

Tuesday
This day was not very exciting. Just classes and reading. I had a headache all day though, which made it special. :P

Wednesday
Today (our looongest day of the week) went well. Our first class, Theatre, was more engaging than last week. We talked about some theatre history (the pageant plays!), did a read through of the script we had read for homework, and discussed the play we saw last week (Private Lives). Then we had our Britain Today course. We mostly talked about the Stuart line of monarchs, focusing on James I and Charles I. Then, to give more life to the description, we visited the Banquet House, where Charles I was in fact executed. You can do that in London. "Oh! You're studying that in history? Well, lets just go visit the site were it actually happened hundreds of years ago and then it will be so much more exciting and real!" ;) It's pretty cool.

Then a few of us wandered around the West End to find a place to eat. We found a little Italian restaurant, which was tasty (but a bit too expensive in my opinion). I had Bruschetta and Spaghetti. They took a long time to serve us, but it was okay because we made it to the theatre in plenty of time to see... Twelfth Night! It was a good show. Unfortunately, I'm ashamed to admit that I started to fall asleep. It wasn't because I was bored! (although I have seen and been involved with Twelfth Night a lot.) I was just really tired. And our seats were kind of uncomfortable. We had no leg room. And we were up really high with a rail in front of us that we had to peer around. It wasn't terrible, it just wasn't very comfortable. I felt that overall it was a good show, but that some of the actors didn't take a lot of risks. Malvolio (played by Derek Jacobi, who has been in many things including Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet as Claudius) was the most interesting portrayal to me. He was pretty hammy and looked like he was enjoying being goofy. It was hilarious to see Sir Andrew and Sir Toby together, because Sir Andrew was a giant (very tall!) and Sir Toby was rather small. It was pretty funny. Oh, and Viola was played by Victoria Hamilton (who--for you BBC Pride & Prejudice fans--was Mrs. Forster in said production). :)

A nice bonus to the night was that we got out of the play at 10pm, which meant getting home around 11pm (which is around when Othello got out last week!). Yay for getting home before midnight!

This is a picture I took of the ceiling of the Banquet House.

This is a picture I took (on a different day) outside the theater we went to tonight.