Day 12

A Night for the Ballet

Last night during the second interval at the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, I passed the time by thumbing through tickets that I keep in my small notebook from my entertainments in London. The list, which does not here include museums, art galleries, walking tours, and popular tourist sites, and time wandering about with a vacant expression, looks like this:

9 plays

2 concerts

1 foreign film

1 opera

1 ballet

I total these up, I suppose, to impress myself as much as anything else.

I have been busy during my seven weeks – to the day – in London. The last four weeks have entailed necessarily monkish living. My wife has been back in the States to oversee the arrival of my fourth granddaughter and to visit again my third granddaughter, herself a very new arrival. Tuesday next she return, and not any too soon as it is clearly time for us to end this monkish separation.

Nine plays. The drama is becoming a bit addictive. It will be a shock to leave London, with its many daily dramatic options, to return to my real life, my normal life, my previous and future lives (all of these) in the rural village I call home.

The opera, I was reminded, emphatically, is drama too. Drama with all the elements of stage plays and music. Such drama! I was encouraged to see an opera before I came to London, so I was acting partly out of that sense of directive. I chose to see Faust, mostly because I am interested in the Faust legend and in the various versions of his story that have been told through the years. This operatic Faust was a visual spectacle, including as it did, both an exploding atom bomb against the backdrop as the curtain rises and a thirty foot tall white cross blazing in the foreground at the play’s climax.

But the real drama of opera happens with the ears. Faust is an aural drama, astonishing, compelling, and moving, with a breathless, draining climax. “Intense” is the word a much younger person apply to the experience.

What drama does with spoken word and opera does with sung words, ballet does without words. Movement, primarily dance, and expression is all.

Here too I had been encouraged to attend a ballet. But I had other motivations as well. Having seen, to date, three Shakespeare plays in the last month and with plans to see Hamlet when it opens in November, I thought I ought to see what Romeo and Juliet would look like as ballet. Then, too, I have become interested in those arcane aesthetic things that are easy to dismiss or to belittle (I am guilty of both): staging, performance, use of space, gesture and expression, costuming, suggestion, lighting, projection, rapport with the audience, uses of tradition, and so forth.

It is likely I will not become a fixture at the ballet – well, my village does not have one anyway – but I came away properly chastened and humbled by the performance. True to the story I know from Shakespeare, our young lovers kill themselves, needlessly, in this rendering too. Or maybe it would be better to say convincingly. I was as entangled as intended as the story played itself out.

I am glad now that I went to the trouble of getting to the theater. I almost let it go. A mere two hours before the curtain was set to rise, having been shut out yet again from seeing another drama, I noticed that the 7:30 performance was to be the last. I went on line but found the online ticket option closed.

To add error to urgency, I left home 45 minutes before curtain trusting the bus would get me there, only to see it move away from the bus stop as I approached. The next bus was 20 minutes off.

Thirty-five minutes till curtain, I began the race walking stride I hoped would work.

I made it by the skin of me teeth.

I was at the ticket counter when “One minute till performance. Take your seats, please,” came over the PA system. It was a lie, of course, as so much in the theater is. The lights did not dim for another five minutes. And I was thoroughly put out by the people who had dallied about the lobby until the last second.

But the lie had done its job – I was seated. Hot and somewhat breathless, but seated.

And it was a fine seat too – best seat in the house for my pensioner’s discount. Unobstructed but for the man and woman in front of me who kept bobbing about, locking faces and looking gooey eyed at each other from start to finish. Has all sense of what is appropriate been lost? I went to a lot of work to see Romeo and Juliet! This is serious drama! Do you think we could just pack in the public displays and watch the ballet please?!