It occurred to me that since I'm up in town most Thursday afternoons, I could use a computer in town to check my route. That way, the TfL Planner couldn't monitor my IP address. But it was a futile gesture. The TfL Planner is smarter than that. And probably smarting, 'cos I got my replacement freedom pass so easily. It appeared to recognise me immediately. How else do you explain an insistence on 20-minute walks; and for a wide variety of routes. It was so distracting that it took me a couple of minutes to notice that none of these suggestions involved using the tube. Despite the request being advice on how to get from Holborn tube station to the street next to Borough tube station. All I actually needed was a reminder how to get from Borough tube station to Southwark Bridge Road. I gave in and just asked it that.
The Central Line was packed. I really couldn't get on the first train, and I can be very determined. The second train had a tourist couple (presumably) with a baby buggy right in the entrance. What will it be like during the Olympics?
And so to the Pacific Playhouse; and 'The Rebel Cell'. The loo is backstage here, and someone nearly got trapped as the performance started. It's part of the excitement of this kind of theatre: is this a member of the cast; how is it going to fit in?
Of course, he didn't fit in. This is a two-hander, variously described as 'hip-hop' and 'rap'. I don't really know what these terms mean (which is why I'm here), but even I could tell neither of these were fitting adjectives for the gentleman nearly trapped in the lavatory.
In fact, coming here is a big adventure. I think this must have been a short test run, at short notice, because the Pacific is briefly available. I instinctively shied away from the Metro blurb: "I don't want to sit for an evening listening to black teenagers reading bad poetry" was roughly the sort of thought winging through my head. Then I thought that an old fogey like me should do exactly that from time-to-time. But that's (roughly) was what I was expecting.
I couldn't have been more wrong. The exuberant nude start made it clear that at least one of the cast was startlingly white. I think part of what makes theatre so exciting is the distance between expectation and delivery. So that may be part of why I thought this was so good. But I don't think so: I think it really was very good. It's a 2007 Edinburgh fringe award-winner (of course, I didn't know that till afterwards). And it's terrific. I emerged from the performance with the word 'Shakespearean' on my lips. Now that's not a word to use lightly about any theatre (even Shakespeare, these days, ha, ha, ha). But, looking at the literature afterwards, it turns out that the Scotsman's critic used the same word in 2007.
It was very fine language, expressing a very interesting conflict of ideas, tied (relatively) neatly into a tale of an imagined future. All this, coupled with the authors being the players, led naturally to the 'Shakespearean' epithet.
So I want to say it's 'Shakespearean'
Which is how I found the experien
-ce. I'm sure there's a lot of theory an'
Stuff to explain why it left me so cheery an'
Full of praise.
I couldn't resist putting that in, 'cos it's more the level I was expecting: that terrible mixture of plain chant and pop rhythms that burst out of shiny little black cars at traffic lights.
Not only a great performance, but fairly short, too. And the journey home was even shorter, from clapping enthusiastically to indoors in less than an hour. Of course, that's partly because it's October.
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