Tag Archives: Machinal

Travel Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2024

We decided to start this day with a stroll past Buckingham Palace. It seemed only proper to drop by the Royal Domicile since we were in London, whether or not the Monarch Himself was at home. (He wasn’t.) However, we did not realize until we got there that the Palace’s ceremonial Changing of the Guard takes place on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays at 11 a.m. (I am not sure what happens to the guards on duty the other days of the week, but I presume they are changed in some other, quieter way.) Since we’d arrived at exactly 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, the entire area was jammed with people. We could get nowhere near the Royal Edifice until the event was over, which took about an hour. There were times when we common folk were packed together to an almost alarming degree, but I believe that all of us survived.

We’d have been more than happy to see the Palace without the Changing of the Guard, but it is quite a production and very colourful. And clearly, four times every week, people come from everywhere to see it. Once we’d managed to extricate ourselves, I decided I was glad that we had seen it too.

(Click on photos for bigger images.)

Our next stop was the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’d loved the V&A on my previous visit a couple of decades ago, and I’d seen a notice about a temporary ceramics exhibition that interested me. It was on the fourth level of the Museum, and on our way to and from it we had an opportunity to check out several other works that delighted and amazed us. Here are just a few of them.

The ceramics show I wanted to see was entitled “Henry Willett’s Collection of Popular Pottery.” (How could a person resist that appealing title?) I am including the explanatory sign about the exhibition, which was as charming as it sounded. It included dozens of intriguing pieces that Willett had collected from “cottage homes” around England in the late 1800s.

There are a whole lot of other interesting pieces in the Museum’s permanent ceramics collections. In fact, according to the V&A website, “The V&A’s Ceramics collections are unrivalled anywhere in the world. Encyclopaedic and global in scope, they encompass the history of fine ceramic production from about 2500 BC to the present day.” If only we’d had a week, just for this one museum… or even perhaps just for this one set of collections in this one museum.

The view from the top floor of the V&A was lovely, as was the architecture in the streets surrounding the museum.

We made our way from the Victoria and Albert just in time to have a delicious sourdough-crust pizza at one of outlets in the excellent Franco Manca pizzeria chain, before taking in a really impressive play entitled Machinal at The Old Vic Theatre. It was a thrill to be in a theatre that I have read about so often in books, articles and reviews over the years. The quality of the production was a (not-unexpected) bonus: how could it be anything but excellent if it was at The Old Vic? (No need to answer this question if you attend the place regularly.) Machinal has a lyrical, devastating script, and the cast was outstanding. I was also taken with the totally offbeat stage design. If the play ever comes to Toronto, or appears in a broadcast somewhere accessible to me, I’m definitely going to see it again.

The Times Literary Supplement said of Machinal, “The Old Vic’s production, transferred from the Ustinov Studio at the Theatre Royal Bath, is an almost perfect piece of total theatre: Richard Jones’s direction, Hyemi Shin’s set, Adam Silverman’s lighting and Benjamin Grant’s phenomenal sound design all work together with Sophie Treadwell’s words and a fully committed cast….”

So that was quite a day. While we were gadding about (or in my case, limping about), according to my watch we added 18,250 steps to our walking total, and 11 flights of stairs.