Back from a very enjoyable, and predictably pricey weekend in London. As dutiful bourgeois, Moira and I shelled out for a bit of the Great Wen’s cultural attractions, in the form of the Vel�zquez exhibition running in the National Gallery and Trevor Nun’s “musical theatre” adaptation of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. I am glad I went to both, although the experience of attending both was coloured by a factor rarely mentioned by professional critics: other people (who can be, if not quite Sartre’s Hell, than at least passingly irritating).
First, the four rooms that comprised the Vel�zquez exhibition in the National Gallery were as crowded as a nightclub at 1 AM. The thing that made such congestion tolerable was that the fellow viewers were not actually like people you would meet in a nightclub at 1 AM. Most, in fact, seemed sober. Still, the profound questions to be addressed when faced with masterpieces such as the portrait of Pope Innocent X and the “Rokeby” Venus–what mental processes should be triggered by these images? and how can you correctly pronounce “Vel�zquez” without sounding like a prat?–were sometimes elbowed aside by more mundane ones, such as will that guy with the backpack chattering away in German move his dummkopf out the bloody way?
Similarly prosaic thoughts flitted through my mind during the performance of Porgy and Bess. The show is staged in the Savoy Theatre, which as that surprisingly entertaining film, Topsey-Turvey recorded, was built by impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte to stage the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. The narrow, art-deco auditorium is among the most steeply raked I’ve ever entered, and after we reached our seats in the dizzy heights of the Upper Circle, looking down into the tube-ticket-sized maw of the orchestral pit far below was enough to bring on vertigo.
During the performance, the dodgy sightlines meant that you had to crane forward to catch the action. And whatever the effectiveness of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in highlighting the artificiality of the theatrical spectacle, nothing is quite as powerful in reminding you that you are not, in fact, sitting on the edge of Catfish Row than the combed-over pate of the person in front suddenly eclipsing Porgy’s crippled legs.
But I did enjoy the show. Honestly.