Mar 8 & 9: Research and Revelations

Uhh, so yesterday and today have basically been all about researching and writing my term paper for Contemporary Britain. I have to write a 2,000 word essay detailing the various arguments for and against monarchy. It's fine, but trying to find hard statistical facts is difficult and writing out the arguments is tedious.

Basically, the queen has no power. Seriously. While they call it "the queen's government" and she "asks" for the Prime Minister to be the PM, it's all controlled by democratic process. Then, once the PM is in office, s/he can basically do whatever s/he pleases without any sort of checks/balances. So basically when Tony Blair wanted to go to war, even if everyone else was against him, he could just push it though no problem. So weird.

Also, apparently the British want their royal family to "be seen and not heard." They want the queen to do all this stuff and be around and everything, but they don't want her to express her views or have an opinion on anything. Apparently Prince Charles feels really strongly about stuff such as better education/child care and the environment, and people are getting super angry that he's taking sides and actually caring about what happens to the UK. I mean okay, so maybe he has better access to people to actually make change that most lobbyists don't, but getting angry because your figurehead is working to make the country better? Oh noes!

(You can tell I've been writing a little too long.)

So yeah. Today has been spent working on that, and going to my theatre class. After that we had a short meeting about Scotland. We leave early Friday morning and can choose our own route to get there (Phillip our theatre teacher gave us some good suggestions about scenic routes and stuff to do on the way). The problem for me though is that I'm going with the group to Scotland Friday Saturday and Sunday, but then I branch off Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday to join up with my boss in a different city called Birmingham to help him run a show I've helped him setup. So I'm basically going to be gone from London for 5-6 days. No idea if I'll have internet, and no idea if I should bring my laptop (which I would then have to lug around for 6 days) or if I should leave it (and then be unable to use the internet to get information if I need a map or address or something).

I think I'm finally beginning to understand why people nowadays love 3G network phones like the iphone and blackberries.

Last night I went to a play at the National entitled "Really Old, Like 45" Surprisingly half of the audience had white/silver hair, and the other half was from a boys school with the little uniforms and stuff. There were a few college aged and teenagers, but less than I expected. The show was really good, with a two leveled set and a revolving wall so they could set up the next scene while people were looking at the upstairs area, and then just rotate and boom, next location. I liked the play a lot, but the poster suggested it was about a woman who had altzheimers and a caged cockatoo. While dementia and getting old and schizophrenia was a part of the plot line, there was nothing about birds except a minor reference to parrots.

My favorite was the robotic hospice nurse. They wired the actor up with a small speaker and ran sound cues through, and the actor was so good at the robotic movements that it took until the final scene for me to be sure it was really a human and not some animatronic the techies made. Her name was Mimi and when the lady with altzheimers stroked her skin she would purr like a cat, and repeat what the old woman said, and when people made angry tones she would back away, and when someone spoke she could turn to look in their general direction. It sounds rediculous, but the way it was staged it seemed brilliant. When the lady got upset because she couldn't remember anything the robot would pretend to sympathize, and then the patient would calm down because the robot was crying and the patient didn't remember that it wasn't real. It could also sit there and listen to the same stories repeatedly because it didn't retain any of the information, just parroted words back every now and again. It made me curious if that could actually be developed to help real patients with memory issues. There was also an actor man who didn't want to admit he was old, and the sister to the alzheimers patient who kept letting this institution take parts of her for medical research. I hafta say though- she might have been an old woman, but she had amazing dancers legs! Either that or they somehow really quickly hid the prosthetic, because she showed off her legs and when they did curtain call the red shoe was still there, but there was no dancer leg in sight, and she was walking around stage barefoot in a same colored stocking. I really thought it was a prothetic leg, but I have to give that woman major credit if that was her real leg.

I found out today that the woman from King Lear who played an amazing fool character has also played King Lear and Hamlet, and has another leading role in another play as Cleopatra. Basically, she's amazing. I also just figured out that she was a minor character in the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. So...that's pretty cool.

Methinks it is time for relaxation, and then sleep.

P.S: the actress' name is Kathryn Hunter. She also directed a production of Othello with the Tonks actress as Desdemona. Just Sayin'