London Bridge etc…: London 2024, Part 2

Right off the bat, we’ll tell you that we aren’t going to knock our stay in London down on a day-by-day, post-by-post experience. The whole point of wanting to spend a long stretch of time in a city like London was to do it in a more residential fashion. Whole days went by where the big excitement was taking our furry ward, Molly, on a novel route for her afternoon stroll. Sometime the adventures consisted of things going wrong! Not that nothing happened, just not multi-paragraphs worth every single day. Case in point: one of our first big events was to go and see our good friend, Sir Ian McKellen (who is totally not really our good friend), in a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV-based history plays in which he was taking the lead as Falstaff. As our other good friend, Robert Burns, wrote: the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men…

The first event that felt like it was going to go wrong was a long-planned (as in, over three visits and almost a decade) spending time at the British Library, and it didn’t take long to manifest. On our first full day in London “on our own” we were up, had brekkies, and made the lovely 15-minute walk (did we mention that our hosts have a hellaciously good location??) to present ourselves at the Library to see their Treasures of the British Library Gallery, a basically permanent exhibit of some of the most intriguing elements of the holdings. This is a room we’ve known about since our first visit to London in 2007, but any time we’ve tried to carve out time for it we’ve either been dead on our feet and unable to concentrate for long, or our schedule went off the rails and we basically dragged our friends through a 15-minute Point-and-Oggle-a-thon. This time we were getting to the Library nice and early, and we had even checked on the website to make sure that they were open that day (a hard-won lesson from other trips *cough Louvre cough*) We knew the Magna Carta exhibit was (temporarily) closed,* but otherwise we were golden. Soooo you can imagine we were a bit nonplussed to see this sign outside the gallery.

Fortuitously, we were there on June 17th and decided to wait. (If you’re wondering, as near as we could figure the sign had been up for at least several days already.) A little after noon the gallery opened, and we were let in to see the treasures. “Hodgepodge” isn’t quite how to describe it, but it’s definitely more of a “greatest hits” vibe than a single unifying theme. There was a gorgeous collection of ancient (as in, some went back almost 1000 years) religious texts from all over the world, including a Gutenberg Bible. An interesting exhibit exploring what a book lined one wall, including books in non-traditional shapes – including one that you wear around your neck (see image_. Other oddities include the original lyrics to “Hey Jude”, the original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland, and a sequence of “first folios” that actually include the first four iterations. There were hours of quiet meandering and contemplation.

The next “might go wrong” event actually did go wrong, spectacularly. It almost even went double wrong thanks to my spam filter, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As mentioned above, we made a point of getting tickets to “Player Kings” once we confirmed that we were going to London. It’s a variant of an exercise that is actually fairly common, condensing “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Henry IV, Part 2” into a single production. If you don’t know, productions of Shakespeare’s plays are almost always cut down, sometimes quite significantly, because tastes (and attention spans) in theater attendance have changed over the centuries and we don’t commonly sit still for 4+ hour plays. (If you’re curious what that’s like, check out Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 production of “Hamlet”; sit comfortably if you do.) Splitting the story of Henry IV into two whole plays almost never cuts the mustard. Besides, to modern audiences (and even audiences of the day perhaps, but I super-extra digress) the main reason to see these plays is for the tragi-comic character of Falstaff; he gets great line after great lines. The character is/was so popular, in fact, that he was brought back again as one of the protagonists(?) in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”; he’s the “Better Call Saul” of the Elizabethan Era. Aaaaannyyyway… point is, condensing the Henry’s and highlighting Falstaff is not uncommon; what was uncommon was getting Ian McKellen as Falstaff. We were super excited… so imagine the disappointment when my news feed somewhat randomly spit out an article that McKellen had suffered a bad fall from the stage the night before and this night’s show was cancelled. The official notification from the box office had hit my spam filter, so if I hadn’t checked the news we’d have made for the theater completely unaware; eek. In the end we decided to make the most of it and honor the dinner reservation we made at J. Sheekey – a meal so interesting that we’ll be publishing a completely separate review of it shortly! The end of the “Player Kings” story is a dud, sadly. Sir Ian clearly wanted to tough his way through his injury in classic “show must go on!” style, but first one show, then two, and finally the rest of the run of the show was kiboshed. They had been cancelling/ rescheduling his performances, but once he was definitely down for the count his understudy was called upon to take the stage. I’m sure they are a fine actor, but there was a reason Sir Ian’s name was on the marquee. Having secured refunds for the tickets we decided to bank our losses and live to another day.

* Closed because climate activists damaged the case protecting the document. Thankfully, the irreplaceable document was undamaged and even the damage to the case was minimal. The two octogenarians responsible have been charged.