London

Delights 

The first sight that met him when he peered in through the window was the most horrific thing he would ever see in his life:

Her face was turned toward him, but there was no life. Her nose had been cut off, as well as her eyelids and eyebrows. The skin of her cheeks and chin had been shaven clean off, and her throat cut so deeply only a few strands connected her head to the rest of her body. Her breasts had been removed with circle incisions, one put beside her head and the other by one of her feet. 

Her abdomen had been cut and splayed open from her genitals to her breastbone. All the intestine had been taken out and dumped on the table next to the bead. The skin on the inside of her thighs had been cut off, the femur bone visible in one place.

Barely human anymore, she resembled something one may find on a butcher’s workbench. 

That was the description of the murdered Mary Jane Kelly, given by the guide at the end of our tour. Mary Jane was the last murder assumed and credited to have been Jack the Rippers last, and by far most gruesome, murder.

***

We got on the half-ten train from Southend to London to see the third year combat and physical theatre’s show cases. A showing created solely for the purpose of showing off the students in the third year, where agents come to look for possible new stars. 

When this was over, we all went to a pub to celebrate a show case well done (and heavens were the third year combats’ show case done well!). But while some went home after a while, and others stayed to get smashed and subsequently terribly hung-over the next day, me and four others did something else.  

The last two weeks before Easter we have priority in devised. While with the Shakespeare priority, where we get a taste of making a show with a director, devised is to give us a try at creating a show entirely on our own from the bottom up. Our theme is The Themes, but apart from this we make everything. My class has been divided in three groups for this, and in my group we have decided to focus on the Jack the Ripper murders. And so, since we were in London, we thought hey, why not? and went on a Jack the Ripper tour. It cost ten pounds a ticket, began at 7.30, lasted over two hours (that we were not prepared for) and we weren’t back in Southend until close to 23.30. It was a bittersweet experience. Fun (the guide was amazing), but exhausting (walking around London’s streets at night for over two hours…) 

And that is what happened Thursday, the 27^th of February.