Overheard, just the other day, near Marble Arch while having lunch, the following conversation:

Aged Father: "What about the Roma who were here last time?"
Daughter (my age, Tory politician). "We're not calling them that, Dad, we're calling them agressive beggars of Eastern European Origin. And we got rid of them."

And thus you know you're surrounded by conservative England. There was a lot of interesting talk during that lunch otherwise, on all types of subjects from the EU to Dickens to Thomas Mann, but that part was the only point where I felt positively Orwellian.

Thursday also saw me watching Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play written by Gina Gionfriddo and performed at Hampstead Theatre. It occurs to me that means that out of five plays I watched during my time in London, three were written by women (Red Velvet, A Taste of Honey and Rapture - Blister - Burn, respectively), and today I also watched a film, The Invisible Woman, which was written by Abi Morgan and based on the book by Claire Tomalin. The times, they are (hopefully) changing. Which was partly the subject of Rapture, Blister, Burn, a play starring Emilia Fox (which is why I went) and Emma Fielding, and focused on women and their choices, and different generations of feminism. ( Rapture-Blister-Burn with spoilers ) It's not a play that offers some amazing new insights but it it's one that offers a very funny depiction of the inevitable imperfection of current day female life (in all its variations). Who says feminists are without a sense of humour?

Thursday was very rainy, so I first went to the National Gallery (me and half of London, but as opposed to the National Portrait Gallery, I hadn't visited the NG for years, and I did want to see some of these paintings in non-printed form again), which was, despite all the other people, a very relaxing thing to do. When wandering around the Impressionists, I was struck again by how many of them sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Britain, which was probably the most sensible thing to do, but can't have been that comfortable an exile, since they all went back once it was over.

Then I watched The Invisible Woman, because non-blockbuster foreign films which weren't co-produced with German money take sometimes a year or so before they get shown in our cinemas, and I really wanted to see this one, for various reasons: I had read Claire Tomalin's Dickens biography, which impressed me in its even handedness and vivacity, Claire Tomalin's report about how the film came to me, and the various reviews which assured me on what were the two most criticial points for me in advance to know: that this film would not excuse Dickens' behaviour by demonizing or denigrating his wife, that it would not play out Nelly against Catherine, on the one hand, but on the other that it would also manage to show just why so many people cared about Dickens as a person, not "just" as an author. (Because otherwise Nelly looks foolish.) And because Nelly's personality always eluded me in the biographies, I hoped for the film, which is after all fiction, to help out there. Which it did. ( The Invisible Woman with spoilers )

My last London play this year was The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse, which is an addition to the Globe; an indoor Jacobean playhouse where the Globe company can now stage plays in winter, too. I had tried for the Duchess of Malfi, their first play in the new house, about which I'd heard great things, but it was completely sold out, so last night I could watch the premiere of the next play, Beaumont's rarely performed Knight of the Burning Pestle. I had never seen it on stage before, and haven't read it though I knew one or two scenes from books about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre - since it is a play-within-a-play type of drama, which breaks the fourth wall with gusto, it gets quoted as an (of course dramatically exaggareted) example of what the stage practice of the day would have been. As it turns out, it is ideal for this particular theatre, which is build similar to the Swan in Stratford, only completely in wood, modelled on the Blackfriars Playhouse. So as opposed to the Globe, you have this relatively small space, with the basic archetectural structure of a refectory with a nod to an alehouse, all in wood. I'd been warned about the hard seats, but let me tell you, for the Bayreuth-trained theatre and opera enthusiast, this was downright comfortable by comparison. Also the play was very much about audience participation; the other thing I was told was that for the Duchess of Malfi, everything was completely dark except for the candles used for lighting. Not so here; the doors were always open, partly because at some points the characters ran off stage and through them and back again, but also because the audience reactions were part of the play so you needed the audience to be visible.

The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents you, among other things, with a London citizen, a grocer, his wife and his apprentice going to a play, not being content with what they watch as they don't like the hero and taking over the plot, inserting a new character, their apprentice, in it who is to have all types of glorious adventures which suspiciously resemble Don Quixote (a book which was out in Spanish but not yet in English at the time so there is some debate whether Beaumont had read it) while the actors try to stage their original play (which is about a London merchant's apprentice being forbidden to marry said merchant's daughter and after all sorts of shenanigans getting together with her anyway), which doesn't fit the demanded adventure plots at all. It's the kind of thing which sounds hopelessly confusing when written but when staged as it was last night really is hilarious, with the whole audience cheering Rafe on when he has his Quixotic adventures and adoring the Citizen and his Wife who were the heart of the performance and sat among the audience commenting when they weren't on stage trying to help the actors/their characters. They are basically Jacobean fandom living the fans-know-everything-better-anyway dream (which tells me Francis Beaumont must have been lectured by fanboys and fangirls a lot), and presented with great affection. Instead of the usual break ca. halfway through a play, for this play we got three interludes that lasted about four minutes during which there were on stage dances, and during which also food and drinks were sold as well (yes, you could, in the true Jacobean spirit, eat and drink during the performance, though at one point one of the actors of The London Merchant went down to the Citizen's wife and took her food away, and one longer, fifteen minutes interlude announced as "privvy break". Like I said, this was pretty much the Rocky Horror Show type of live performance audience experience, Jacobean style, and terrific fun from beginning to end.

Today: the sun has come back! Will walk a while before heading off to the airport - my flight is in the afternoon. What a trip!