Mojo

In the Harold Pinter theatre.

Toria and I ordered the tickets on October the 13th - a whole three months ago. That's kinda strange to think about. But anyway, Mojo is a show staring the amazing Colin Morgan and Rupert Grint, plus some other guys (Daniel Mays, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Coyle, and Tom Rhys Harries). The story takes place in the end of 1950, a time described in the program thusly: 

"The characters in Mojo may be fictional, but the world from which they spring is still just about visible in the rear view mirror of time: a world of musty Locarnos in bombed out suburbs where silence gave way to a succession of brand-new sounds: the thrilling alien noise that an electric pick-up made when attached to a guitar".

Mojo was originally a film, in which Harold Pinter himself starred, so I guess it's only fitting the play was put on in the his namesake theatre. Opened on the 5th of October 1881, it has quite the history. Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe saw the world premiere of A View From a Bridge there for instance, in that very theatre I set my feet. That is quite the humbling, yet accelerating, thought. Also, according to the program, they have an original program from the war period on display outside the Dress Circle which has actual air raid instructions printed on the back. Though I didn't read this until we had left the theatre, so I didn't get to see it. Mainly because we left in a hurry, you must understand, weaving our way to the stage door through tons of fellow audience members. 

 

We stood in the English winter cold for a whole, long fifteen minutes with other hopeful people, fully determined to see Colin Morgan in the flesh. This, only to finally realize and acknowledge the fact the stars had sneakily left via some other exit long before. Kind of really seriously disappointed over this, but my hope of one day meeting Colin Morgan (and Rupert Grint) face to face is still standing strong.

So, til next time.

Filling Time

Teacher edition

For combat today we were supposed to continue a group fight with rapier and dagger that we started earlier this week. However, we were four people short (caused by injury and illness), and really, that made it mildly impossible to follow this plan. 

So what do you do when you suddenly have two hours on your hands and no lesson plan? Why, you break out the hand-and-a-half broadswords. Because we’re that awesome, and spent the two hours more or less fooling around with broadswords doing little two-on-one group fights. 

(Hand and a half broadsword is one of the weapons we did in the third term of year one).

Pigeons

Monday night I was going to scribble about how the first week of a term is always really long and all nights too short, but the morning came with a pigeon:

Monday morning we walked into studio four in Clifftown theatre (where half our classes take place), but instead of the voice teacher greeting us, there were several globs of spit on the ground. Or at the very least what we thought was spit – of the more disgusting variety with white stuff in it. Ten minutes later revealed it was in fact something quite different when a pigeon noisily took flight between the rafters in the ceiling. 

We spent five minutes watching the terrified bird fly about, settle, and take off again, crashing into one of the skylight windows twice before the teacher eventually arrived. Tom and Luke worked together to set up a big ladder and open one of the windows, and we moved on to studio three.

What eventually happened to the pigeon is anyone’s guess, but reliable sources tell me the security guards spent a good half hour staring at the open skylight window with no apparent clue of how to close it, and that by Monday night there was no pigeon.