Theatres National and Royal

National Theatre

I went to two illustrious playhouses yesterday--we toured the National Theatre in the early afternoon and went to see One Man, Two Guvnors at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in the evening.

The National Theatre is on the south bank of the Thames, not too far from the Globe or the London Eye. I feel like I only know London in relation to the Tube stations, and I'm slowly getting my bearings above ground.

We crossed this lovely footbridge to get to the National Theatre from the Embankment Tube station.

See--off in the distance you can see the dome of St. Paul's, and the Globe (not visible) is right across the Thames from it.

The National Theatre! Our tour guide took us inside two of the three theatres that are contained within the National Theatre--the Olivier Theatre, the largest one, and the Lyttleton Theatre, the medium-sized one. The Olivier auditorium was named for Laurence Olivier, artistic director of the National Theatre and well-known actor, and has a semicircular design fashioned after the famous ancient auditorium in Greece. The feature of this theatre that I thought was the most interesting was that they have a drum revolve--there's a circular "drum"--a hollow cylinder that is almost the width of the stage that goes all the way down to the riverbed--that they can sink whole sets down in to and bring them up with a push of a button. So cool. There's also a flytower--the highest part of the theatre visible in the picture--where they can put pieces of the set on hooks and raise and lower them for storage and/or scene changes. 

On our tour we also saw some of the workshop where they make their own sets and props. From all this I'm beginning to get a sense of how large a production theatre really can be--there is so much that goes into it from so many different people.

After our tour I stood a little bit up the river from the National Theatre and took the following four pictures from the same spot:

The London Eye

Looking back at the theatre

Graffiti art

The footbridge again

I just took this picture because it seemed rather picturesque.

So later we saw One Man, Two Guvnors, and I don't think I've laughed so much in a production since I've been here. The actor playing Francis, the very hungry main character, was quite brilliant, and SO funny. The show was an interactive one, and he did an excellent job playing to the audience and even laughed at himself so much that he missed a couple of his cues. It was very Red Skelton-like. There were some real moments in that show that made it memorable and lots of fun.