More of the London We Love

On one level our trip was a theatrical splurge. We saw eight plays in the seven days.
Most exciting perhaps was Dame Judy Dench in Noel Coward's Hay Fever. Most scenically entrancing was the new production of Peter Schaffer's Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre. Though well reviewed a new piece called Southwark Fair directed by Nick Hytner at the National seemed to us pretty thin and unappealing gruel. More compelling was the National's revival of a Harley Granville Barker play called The Voysey Inheritance. It was written in the early 1900's but its story of a lawyer who has stolen from the estates entrusted to him in order to enrich his and his family's fortunes is as modern as Enron. Timothy West was a marvelously enigmatic former spy in a revival of Alan Bennett's 1977 The Old Country. I can't wait to get a chance to see his History Boys that just opened on Broadway. Other well known stars were also on stage in the West End. We saw Dame Diana Rigg in a drama about adultery and a disintegrating marriage and Jeremy Irons in an almost solo tour de force titled Embers.

Art of the visual kind took up a fair amount of the days. We visited the Royal Academy, the British Museum, the National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery.