London Day 3

It had been another warm night in the apartment but the new day was raining and cool. I went off to Canary Wharf to meet Joan, without Lee who was not feeling well. Joan got misled by a mislabeled bus which confused us both enough to go to opposite ends of the station. Having taken the tube to Southwark and walked through a maze of streets we eventually found the Globe in the rain and got tickets for the 11:30 guided tour. As The Globe is open air, the tour was done partly in the rain. The stage was being set up for a performance that afternoon of a French/English/Indian version of The Tempest. As we finished, Lee arrived and we all took a look at the thorough exhibit of the theatre's history and Elizabethan times. From there we walked next door to the Tate Modern, where the first thing we did was have lunch in the cafe. Then we did two exhibits, one contemporary African with a general play on Money. The other was about Surrealism and was a real treat for me as I got to first hand many paintings I've known from prints for over thirty years. eg Magritte, Max Ernst, Arp, Tanning, Tanguay, Delvaux, Picabia, Fini and more. We collected our bags from cloaking and found a smaller cafe bar for coffee before walking off along the Thames towards London Bridge station. This took us past a replica of the Golden Hind (the ship made famous by Francis Drake) and Southwark Cathedral, which Joan remembered as having been to for a concert by Yehudi Menuin. As we'd offered Joan to use our apartment to fill the gap in her time in London, she came along to see exactly where it was and how to get in. After a short rest we headed back out for the theatre to see The Book of Mormon. We got Leicester Square a little early so we wandered through the Chinatown area and got a fruit drink. The theatre seemed strangely small for such a successful show, which was a feeling I had first in its bar and then again having made our seats inside. While the stage was normal sized, the depth of the audience space was much shorter than I'm used to. The shorter stalls area is merely that, but the single circle above it was steeper than many upper circles in general Australian theatres. This partly explains why London has so many shows on at once and why they have longish runs. With not many people in at a time it takes quite a few performances to chomp through a regular attendance aggregate. The show itself was marked by enthusiastic and fun performances, which had the audience pumped at the end of each major number. If we were expecting South Park level satire then we were wrong, instead it was both more generous about its main topic and posed a heavier burden of "and what would you have done" philosophy to take home. No memorable songs but that is normal these days I suppose.