At Covent Garden Market, I took one photo of St. Paul’s Church where, in G. B. Shaw's play Pygmalion (which by the way is so much better than the musical My Fair Lady, since Shaw was a feminist), Eliza Doolittle met Henry Higgins on the portico. The portico has great big simple columns, and there’s a big clock face way overhead.
We went to Covent Garden Market and couldn’t see any Pollock’s Toy Museum—just a Pollock’s Toy Shop along with many shops, and through the center of the market were many booths that, at about 10 am, were just opening. We went to the Theatre Museum, which has a big exhibit on the history of London theatre. I paid particular attention to costumes—there were just a few displayed on dress forms and dummies, including some from a production of a play based on and called The Hobbit, with greenish, plant-like costumes, appliqués and shiny drapery, robe-type garments, and also a big purple and black spider (which would no doubt be worn as a costume). I also paid particular attention to models—I made at least one, a Georgian room, when I majored in theatre.
The Covent Garden Market has an underground level, and in the center is a posh restaurant with, outside, café tables and many people seated at them. A railing surrounds an open rectangular overhead, so that you can look down—we could hear the musicians, a string quartet, before we could see them, and the first time we saw them we were leaning over this railing. The quartet played stuff like Pachabel’s Canon—that was wonderful. A soprano alternated with them, but I think her musical accompaniment was an orchestra on a CD, not live musicians. At least for the quartet, the musicians had a basket for money, and they were selling CDs—I donated some coins.
Later, when we were down below, standing a few feet away from the quartet, the violinist, while he played, smiled whimsically and kept dipping his violin, pointing with it toward the basket of tips. I found this very comical but didn’t add more coins, since I had already donated. He was pale and slender, with light golden hair, large blue eyes, a pointed sharp nose and a pointed chin. Puck freelances in Covent Garden.
After we got down below and took a look at the menu for this underground restaurant, I discovered that the food was not cheap by any means, so we ended up going back upstairs and actually eating at a sandwich bar, which played a quite different sort of music, but we nonetheless hung around and listened to the live music quite a bit, off and on.
Covent Garden also includes clowns and people in dramatic and weird costumes doing stuff like standing perfectly still on a box, pretending to be a statue. The latter was a clown with a ruff and ruffled cuffs. A gypsy-like young woman sat cross-legged and sang and played a guitar. It was very Bohemian and alive, and crowded, and this was a weekday. We mostly saw these performers while we went up a narrow street back toward the Tube station. A man who was completely metallic gold stood chatting with a clown.
In the afternoon, a clown performed in front of St. Paul’s Church (I took a photo of the market from the church point of view, and the photo I believe will show a crowd of people lined up and watching the clown), and the clown wore black and white horizontal striped tights, black shoes, black knee britches, a black and red striped shirt, and a red satin jacket. Spiffy for a clown—but basically he did magic tricks, such as juggling three swords while stepping over a volunteer from the audience, who lay on the pavement blindfolded.
At one point, Brat wanted to sit down, but there was pretty much no place to sit; the curb was already filled with people, so we went out of sight of the clown, into a little courtyard next to St. Paul’s Church and through a grand iron gate. Dead people lay buried under the stones, and some bushes and trees and park benches surrounded us, but few live people. Some of the dead people died of the plague in the seventeenth century, and the markings were faded and unreadable, but others were from the early nineteenth century and still somewhat legible. So it was relaxing, to sit here in the courtyard and drink whatever we were drinking at that point. We were not there long before a priest or someone came along and announced that the gates were about to be locked—it was about 5 pm. This was shortly before we headed back to the Tube station.
At Pollock’s Toy Shop, I bought a bunch of toy theatres, paper ones. The shop had an entrance door on the ground floor, and you went up this staircase with various landings till you got up to the little store itself, very full but well organized space. While you climb the stairs, you can look at antique jumping jacks and such hung on the walls.
Cleopatra’s Needle
Cleopatra's Needle is a short walk from Covent Garden Market, it’s by the Thames. Actually, we walked right past the Savoy, a beautiful Victorian hotel with curved glass windows on the corner, on our way to Cleopatra’s Needle. It’s 1500 years old or so, brought from Alexandria, where the monolisk lay for centuries. In the Victorian era, someone made the two sphinxes that flank the needle.
Now I’m seated on steps by the monument, off to the side, and water (the Thames) is at the bottom of the steps. The water keeps steadily splosh-sploshing onto the bottom two steps (stone steps) and it’s muggy brown water and it doesn’t smell very good. It’s very sunny here, almost too much so, definitely warm, like around the seventies. Since when do I think the seventies are warm? Maybe it just feels that warm because of the pavement and sunlight.
The bottom three steps are wet, but that’s just assuming that it doesn’t descend further into the Thames—there may be steps completely submerged in there. A tubular metal railing is on each side of the staircase, and the rail disappears beneath the water, well after what looks like the last step, so it’s possible that the steps go down, down, down…to where? Perhaps there’s a secret place under the Thames, like a house. Perhaps the river wasn’t quite as deep when the Victorians built the embankment (1864-70). Looking up from the steps, to my right, I see plenty of stone or concrete, blocks forming the embankment, with green copper lions—as if gigantic doorknockers—lined up along the edge, every few feet. Above each lion is an elaborate, twisting, and black metal light pole swirling up to a round globe. At the base of the large post are swirling fish, a couple of fish and other miniscule details. Below that is a rectangular base with a floral design molded on it. There’s a long row of these lamps on both sides of the water, and I first noticed them on the first Globe night.
The water is splashing more, and the waves are stronger, and now it’s up to the fifth step as it sloshes more determinedly. But oh, it’s because of a boat buzzing by, creating more waves—it’s not the tide or a sea monster approaching.
Back to Covent Garden
It was about 4 pm by the time we set foot in the London Transport Museum, and at that point we had decided we’d only go in if it were free, since we wanted to get on the Tube at about 5. Well, it was 6 pounds to get into the museum, so we settled for exploring the museum shop meanwhile.
Hamlet at the Old Vic
There were delays in the subway, but eventually we got to Waterloo Station. The grumbling brat completely could not remember the way to the Old Vic, but I remembered visual things like what buildings we passed, though not which streets and underpasses, so we went with that. When we were almost in front of the little old church with a yard paved in tombs behind an iron fence, my sister rushed into the street to cross it (not for the first time). I started to hesitantly step across when a car stopped in front of her. Unfortunately, it was a cop car. It’s a bad sign when you get pulled over, and you’re not even driving. The bobby talked to Brat, and she said we were tourists from the States, and he warned her to be careful and that we should use the underpasses. A little bit later, while we walked down the sidewalk, Ms. Thing had a mild fit (mild by her standards, that is) about not having any memory of how to get there, and I said that I remember buildings and scenery, not streets and underpasses. That’s what it boiled down to—I was leading the way based on visual aids. And that’s how we got there—to the Old Vic and the Thai restaurant very close to it. I don't see what she gets out of using everything as an excuse to be a bitch and thereby making every situation infinitely worse than it otherwise would be.
The restaurant where we had a delicious dinner was called Thai Silk. I ordered Phad Thai with bean curd, followed by coffee, and we split a desert of apple fritter like stuff, but we were in a hurry to get to the Old Vic, because Hamlet started at 7 pm, not 7:30 or so (7:30 is quite typical). Restaurants in London are very leisurely, and this was one occasion when I didn't want to wait around.
The actor playing Hamlet, Ben Wishaw, was everything my sister’s Canadian friend and her husband said he would be—he seemed like a gawky teenage boy going through an awkward stage, like when you’re a teenager and you can’t stand your parents. Hmmm. Then again, does that phase ever end? But anyway, in one scene, Hamlet’s mom and his uncle are sitting elegantly on one side of the stage, looking like a Yuppie couple, and Hamlet, dressed entirely in black and with black boots and a black stocking cap, petulantly plopped down, sprawled out in a chair with his back to them, and curled his arm around his head. It was a modern dress production, and the whole thing was superb. Ophelia looked and acted very much like a modern teenager also, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Shadows were important. Upstage left was a very long, straight staircase leading up to a door, and when the door opened a stream of light would come in, in contrast with the otherwise dark stage decor. Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern showed up with hiking gear, and I thought they looked vaguely like hobbits, perhaps in part because one of them had a slight physical resemblance to Sean Aston, from the Lord of the Rings films.
