Tuesday September 21st: More Cool Theatre Stuff!

Yesterday (Monday) I went on a tour of the National Theatre.  It was so amazing to go behind the scenes to see the workshops, rehearsal spaces, backstage areas, and stage mechanics of this incredible building.  There are three theatres within the NT:  the Littleton (a traditional proscenium-arch stage), the Olivier (a thrust-stage, where the audience is 118degrees around the rounded stage), and the Cottsloe (a blackbox theatre, which can be turned into virtually any stage/audience configuration).  When we went to see Danton's Death last week, it was in the Olivier Theatre; last night we saw The Habit of Art on the Littleton's stage.  I could literally talk for hours about how beautiful the National Theatre is, but I will spare you the details that my theatre-geekiness is obsessing over.  Moral of the story:  I want to live and breathe this theatre.

Today we went on a walk with my "London: Biography of a City" class, where we explored "The City to the East" aka the 1-square mile that is the actual City of London.  The City, as it's called, is the financial center of England, which includes important buildings such as the stock exchange building and the main building for the Bank of England.  We saw the home of the Lord Mayor (who is different than the Mayor of London; the Lord Mayor presides over The City only, and the Mayor of London presides over the whole of Greater London), as well as lots of old churches both pre- and post-Blitz era.  The highlight of the walk was at the end, when we got to The Monument, a large obelisk that was constructed in memorial of the Great Fire.  We climbed up 300-some-odd steps on a spiral staircase to reach the top, and had an amazing view of London.  (I'll post a picture of the monument when I'm back on my own computer and have access to pictures)

My Shakespeare teacher told us that there was a well-known study done to monitor what parts of a person's brain was engaged when certain materials are being read or learned by that person.  For example, when a person was handed a history textbook, a certain part(s) of the brain would light up on the monitor; when they were then handed a fiction novel, a different part(s) of the brain would light up.  This was tested on subject after subject in order to gather actual scientific data.  The Fun Fact of the Day is that when a subject was handed Shakespeare to read, the entire brain would light up on the monitor, proving that your whole brain is engaged while reading Shakespeare.