A play, when done well...

A play, when done well, has the power to inhale it’s audience, chew on it a bit and then spit it into the lobby changed. It’s an exhilarating experience when one gets to view such a play. Elmina’s Kitchen, which I saw tonight, had that sort of power. While there were a few things that I didn’t like wholly, it definitely succeeded in altering/alerting the audience. It was one of those plays where, when curtain call finally happens, it’s a relief because you are just completely destroyed but in a good way. Like Fix Up, another piece written by Kwame Kwei-Armah, Elmina’s Kitchen showed a sub-culture not readily understood except by those living it. The play focused on the London (though it translates to American perfectly) “thug” culture but didn’t concentrate on the street side of things but rather on the societal conditions and consequences of such a life, through the eyes of a family living within it. There was no forced empathy for anyone and emotions achieved were organic. Through the course of the play, I began to really see why such a seemingly dangerous culture exists and the inevitability of its continuance in the fragmented, half-digested world that we live in. We are all products of our environments and histories. The relics of slavery and institutionalized/ingrained racism are constantly informing how our current society ticks even as we (as a community) try to correct our mistakes. It will take a very long time for us to come to full equality, understanding and trust. Thankfully, plays like the one I’ve just seen, help to speed us toward that eventual healing and to foster an understanding.

In other news, the talk of the town today was of course London’s winning the bid to host the Olympics in 2012. Thank God they’ve won because I don’t know what these people would’ve done had it gone to Paris or New York. You can’t spit here without hitting a “Back the Bid” ad. They’re everywhere; on newspapers, tube windows, billboards, t-shirts, tv. Britain was going crazy for the chance to host and everything that happened was big news. Apparently, earlier this week, Jacques Chirac of France made a comment about the poor quality of British food. I thought this was common knowledge and even a joke to the Brits. It seems I was wrong…it caused a huge furor in all the papers and looked like it might seriously hurt Franco-British relations. Thankfully, at least on this side of the channel; crisis averted. We’ll see how G8 plays out now. It’s kind of ridiculous how much they wanted to host. Tony Blair’s full time job for the last two weeks it seems has been trying to secure this bid. Britons can sleep well tonight knowing that the games will be here in seven years.

Along an Olympic theme, I went to the British museum today to get a look at the Elgin Marbles which were of course a hot-button topic for the Athens summer games. I’ve always felt that the marbles really belong in Athens and, in today’s world, I’m sure they’d be safe there. They’re really pretty cool even in ruins. I also got to see some mummies and various Egyptian sculptures and artifacts and stuff from every other area of the globe. Ya know, almost everything in the British museum is not British. It’s a treasure trove of the world’s art and culture, procured when Great Britain was THE world power and ethics hadn’t advanced to the point of allowing a people to keep their own art. Of course, there’s always the argument that at the time, the Brits were pretty much the only people that could protect these artifacts and that the British museum had (has?) all the world’s best restorative scientists. At any rate, it’s cool to see the stuff even if I don’t like how it came to be here.
I’ve been looking for an apartment for Rachel and I. Right now, I have a room in South Kensington that I’m paying way too much for. It’s a great area though. Yesterday I saw a place in Harlesden which is a horrible area. I wasn’t prepared for such squalor in London. Maybe it’s my American sort-of rose-colored glasses but….c’mon. It was like a stylized set of what a ghetto is. It was an overgrown “yards”, broken glass, fat men in A-Shirts sitting outside drinking a Foster’s 40 in a crooked lawn chair, barking dogs in parked cars kinda place. Too bad the flat was actually really cool. Hopefully I’ll have better luck tomorrow in Ealing which is rumored to be a “really cute” area. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Sorry to those of you trying to read this page when you just have a couple of minutes…