Wednesday was the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and a Tintin stage show in the evening.
The National Gallery was interesting, housing more art than I can possibly explain adequately. I particularly like the older Italian art, but it can get a bit repetitive as SO many works were devoted to the same few Biblical subjects.
The National Portrait Gallery was also fun, at least for the more modern ones. There were tons of sitting portraits for Tudor and Victorian types, which were pretty repetitive, but the portraits of more recent famous people were so much more interpretive and abstract. Some notable people included Beatrix Potter, Princess Diana, Elizabeth I, Virginia Woolf, and many many others.
After that we went to a stage production in Richmond (suburb on the outskirts of London) of a Tintin book . It was based on the book Tintin in Tibet. While it was oriented slightly more towards children, it was very well adapted and acted, and was very fun to watch. The stage was very simple, with slightly different slanted sections on the front section of the stage, acting a little bit like a ramp going back and forth. This meant that the stage looked flat, but the acrobatic cast could throw themselves across the stage and could actually slide left, right, or even down towards the audience.
It was fun to have little kids in the audience laughing, but I was surprised by a few of the more grown-up themes. One of the more sophisticated and somber scenes took place as Tintin went to the plane crash site in the Himalayas, where a plane has crashed, presumably leaving no survivors. To set the scene, the empty stage was dimmed, two floor panels slid aside, and two arch-shaped plane pieces emerged from the floor. When they unfolded, they formed a cross-section of the crashed plane, with about three rows of empty seats facing toward the audience. In silence, about twelve people dressed for travel, walked solemnly onto the stage, sat themselves into the seats, buckled themselves in, and them slumped over, as if suddenly dead from the crash. Tintin then climbs into the dark cavern of the plane and climbs over the bodies trying to see if his friend (who was flying out to see him on the plane that crashed) is on the plane. Tintin gets so scared that his imagination gets the best of him and the bodies come to life, reaching for him and eerily calling out to him to save them. “Stop!” Tintin yells, over and over again, but the voices only grow louder and louder until finally, curled up in a ball with his head in his hands he gets so scared that he yells, “Stop! You’re already dead and I can’t save you from that!”
Quite a moral for a children’s play.
Hope Helps 