December in London: Theatres, Art, and Antiquity

We chose the St Giles for its central location. Positioned at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street in the heart of London's West End, it is arguably the most central hotel in the capital. It is within walking distance of Oxford Street, China Town, Theatreland, Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Soho, and the British Museum. The nearby Tottenham Court Road underground station allows easy access to other London attractions.

The hotel is a modern, purpose-built, independently run three-star establishment. The brightly titled entrance provides a warm reception. Climbing a few steps brought us to the queues at the four reception desks. Eventually we reached a desk and the receptionist started her search through the many pieces of paper filed in boxes in different locations for our booking details. Eventually we received the digital key for twin-bedded room no. 533.

The 655 rooms range from Standard and Superior rooms to Mini-Suites. All have a shower but no bath. Each room has a direct dial telephones with voicemail, in-room safes, hair dryer, tea- and coffee-making facilities, and remote-control television with PayPerView movie channels.

Four roomy guest lifts run between reception and the 11th floor, to the soothing sound of music, which causes many an eye to turn heavenward with that "god, not again"expression! For those on the 12th floor, a flight of stairs awaits!

The room proved small, clean, and decorated in a modern style. Light wooden furniture fitted into the limited space as craftily as that in any yacht’s cabin. A stand for our case was located in a wardrobe. Slightly staggered room frontages allowed a window view along Tottenham Court Road, with Westminster visible in the distance. The murmur of traffic permeated the room. The shower room had no ventilation, leading to a steam room effect, while the bedroom’s only ventilation was by opening the window.

The next day we went down to Hugo's 165-seat Rotisserie & Bar for breakfast around 9am. A queue wound it way around three sides of the room--the lesson learned, get down early. The breakfast, though, was plentiful, with a warm buffet choice of full English or continental if wanted. The hotel also has a 90-seat Italian restaurant serving fresh handmade pizzas, pasta dishes, and other Italian specialities.

We also had an evening meal in Hugo’s. The evening staff proved more welcoming and service oriented than the morning staff, and seating was immediately available. This restaurant incorporates the main bar of the hotel and serves what I would term pub grub. The half chicken I ordered was dry and overcooked.

Although we didn’t use it, guests have free entry to the YMCA health and fitness centre found beneath the hotel. Accessed by two of the hotel lifts, these offer free use of a 25m swimming pool, sauna, and exercise machines.

In all, it is a serviceable hotel but not one to boast about.

We came to London to take in the latest smash hit musical, ‘Billy Elliot’, in celebration, or commiseration, of my wife’s birthday which contained a big ‘0’. The show is hosted by the Victorian Palace Theatre, which dates from 1911. Its grey marble foyer with its gold mosaic and white Sicilian marble pillars is much as it was then. The fully air-conditioned auditorium holds 1550 seats in the Stalls, Dress Circle and Upper Circle combined. The theatre features a sliding roof, a simple but still effective forerunner of air-conditioning.

Originally a multi-award-winning film, the moving story of Billy Elliott broke box office records worldwide and the musical by all accounts could also. A very British story set in Durham during the 1980s miners’ strike, it is a funny, heart-warming and feel-good celebration of a young boys dream.

The music legend, Elton John joins the original film creative team: director Stephen Daldry, writer Lee Hall and choreographer Peter Darling to create the musical. With its rags-to-riches story, the piece invites sentimentality. But that’s scarce in the pit village where young Billy discovers he has a gift for dance. Grannies remember their late husbands as ‘bastards’, girls invite boys to look at their fannies, little lads tell people to piss off and ballet is for middle-class poofs.

The show allows even these ballet-haters to clump around effectively to music. We get dances by police and miners that start in Keystone Cop’s style. It gets alarming when batons and clubs appear and ends with a number in which Billy flutters and bangs like a crazed moth against a terrifying wall of riot shields.

James Lomas was the boy chosen from the regular threesome to play Billy and he proved impressively grave and dignified as an actor and superbly skilful as a dancer, perhaps helped by having done gymnastics and karate since he was six. In an episode slightly over-the-top, he whirls on the shoulders of his adult self and sails aloft to the music of Swan Lake.

The props were mostly moved on and off by the cast. If any of the cast should make a mistake in their performance it was skilfully glossed over as though it was part of the script - to merriment from the audience. Although the musical contained no smash hits numbers it is how the elements of the show blend together that makes the musical.

The show as a whole is a celebration of dance though it becomes political in parts. Tony Blair name gets mentioned. At the time he appeared on the same political platform as the leader of the miners’ union, the firebrand Arthur Scargill – hardly the Tony we know today! In one number, striking pitmen put on a Christmas panto complete with Spitting Image puppets of Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher with a song calling for her death. Typical of a show filled with passion for a community, for the rights of the individual and, above all, for the dance.

Being only a short walk from our hotel, we visited the British Museum. Its advantage is that everything stretches out before leaving you are free to make your own discoveries--instant world travel! Some might view this stripping the earth of its treasures as a tragedy, but often it is the only way to preserve them. The Elgin Marbles would, for instance, have been destroyed by corrosive pollution if left on the Parthenon in Athens

The museum, established in 1753, is the world's greatest collection of antiquities, particularly from Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Rome, and Asia. Among its most famous holdings are the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and the Portland Vase. The British have gone to the ends of the earth in search of artefacts to document the history and aspirations of the civilizations and cultures of every continent. It all comes together here, from Rome to the Far East, from the Americas to the Pacific Rim. The collection is too vast for anyone to truthfully say they have "done" the museum.

Its creation was spurred by a private donation to the government in the 1730s of over 71,000 exhibits. These combined with another collection already held created an urgent need for a museum. Additions to the collections led to continual remodelling of the building, leading to a mixture of Victorian, French, and Greek Revival architecture styles. The central plaza contained the Reading Room, one of the great centres of European scholarship, where Karl Marx famously wrote Das Kapital. At the turn of the millennium, this Reading Room was given its own museum, The British Library. Then a delicate glass dome was erected over the entire central plaza, creating the Great Court. Its dome arches gracefully over the floor below and converges on the copper roof of the former Reading Room, as if one dome rested on another. It is a spectacular sight and enhances the rest of the building's architecture. It is also a good place to have a cup of coffee and a snack or browse the bookshop.

I spent a considerable time in the first gallery I came to that was devoted to Islam. In truth, it would be possible to spend a day or so studying the beliefs and achievements of each of the many cultures covered. Having only a few hours before catching the connections back to the airport, I realised that a whirlwind tour was called for. Fortunately, photography is allowed, so I have a record of some of the main items together with their captions.

To assist those who know what they are looking for, COMPASS is available in the former Library's Reading Room. It provides a much-needed orientation tool for the surrounding galleries.

The museum hosts lectures, study days, and celebrations of cultures. The latter often includes a host of free activities, performances, and displays, which may include dancers, listening to stories, and music. If I stayed in London, I would attend many of those.

We had a guided tour of the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which we wouldn’t have missed for the world. That the theatre is here at all is all down to Sam Wanamaker, an aspiring actor. He worked for 20 years until his death to raise funds to re-create the theatre. Finally, in 1997, a replica of the theatre built in 1599 but burnt down in 1613 opened in Bankside as close to the original site as possible. Shakespeare chose this area because it was outside the jurisdiction and controls of London.
The Theatre is now a centre for the study of the great bard and a celebration of his life and works. Craftsmen used the material and techniques used in building the original in Elizabethan times. The green oak timbers provide a link back to Shakespeare's time, as some were then saplings. Only joints cut into the timber and wooden pegs hold them together. Lime, sand, and goat's hair plaster face up the walls and the roof is thatched.

The new Globe isn't an exact replica, seating 1,500 on wooden benches in the ‘bays’ with 500 ‘groundlings’ standing and not the 3,000 who originally squeezed in. Its thatched roof treated with a fire retardant won’t catch fire. A spark from a cannon fired during a performance ignited the thatch on the original and burned the theatre to the ground. A boy curious about the spikes now arranged along the roof of the building wondered if they were for the heads of actors who forgot their lines as he had seen spikes at the Tower of London formerly used for mounting severed heads. The Globe spikes are more mundane being water sprinklers!

The open-air Globe Theatre offers performances only during the summer season from mid-May to mid-September. Performances take place at 2pm as in the original theatre but with flood lighting added can now take also place in the evenings. As in Shakespeare's day the ‘groundlings’ surround the stage and can make their feelings about the performance crystal clear to the actors. With few props or furniture and no theatrical lighting or scenery, clothes are the Globe’s chief visual effect. These have to withstand the closest scrutiny from the audience.

The Shakespeare's Globe Exhibition housed in the Under Globe offers a comprehensive coverage of the Elizabethan theatre construction and its dramas. On display are clothes such as those worn in The Tempest. Other exhibits give a glimpse of the many crafts used in making the actors clothes and in cleaning and preserving them. Also there are occasional displays and workshops, some aimed at children.

When we visited a fair to commemorate the Great Frost Fair of 1621 held on the frozen waters of the Thames close to the Globe was in progress. A miniature of the actual 1621 Fair itself showed how it must have looked.

OPEN: Exhibition and viewing daily 10am-5pm. Tube: Mansion House, then walk across the Millennium Bridge.

Following a visit to the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, we decided to take in the neighbouring Tate Modern as well. Its home, the vast former power plant now linked to St Paul's Cathedral by the new millennium footbridge across the Thames, seems an implausible home for a major art museum. A remarkable combination of the old and the new, the brick-clad steel building’s central chimney rears 325 feet (99m), only fractionally lower than the dome of St Paul's Cathedral.

The most noticeable change to the outside of the former power station is a two-storey glass construction spanning the roof. It provides natural light into the galleries on the top floors and houses a café offering outstanding views across London. Inside, while three floors offer exhibition space, the cavernous cathedral-like Turbine Hall still exists as a challenge to artists and curators.

In the 5 years since Tate Modern opened, it has become a huge social, profitable, and artistic success. Even more than Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, which opened 100 yards away in 1997, Tate Modern energized the long-neglected Southwark neighbourhood. Art galleries and restaurants have sprung up while renovations and new buildings have appeared.

Tate Modern draws crowds averaging average 11,200 a day, devoted to art but also to hanging out in its large bookstore, its cafes, and its top-floor restaurant overlooking the river. Looking across to St Paul’s Cathedral is like looking at an art show in itself.

Art museums tend to be a mixture of art, pretentiousness, and plain silliness. Examples of the latter: The Tate Museum exhibited a sculpture of 120 firebricks arranged in a rectangular formation and another contained frozen elephant dung. "Embankment," the latest in the Unilever series of commissions to use the cavernous Turbine Hall, falls also, I think, either into pretentiousness or the silly category. By Rachel Whiteread, a British sculptor, it consists of a labyrinth-like composition made from 14,000 casts of the insides of different cardboard boxes, stacked to occupy this cathedral-like space. Some popular art, like "The Dancing Butler" by Jack Vettriano, the most expensive Scottish painting sold so far, on the other hand, is not recognised as art by any art museum.

However, the pop artist Andy Warhol has won through. He raised celebrity to an art form and is now one of the best-known artists of all time and has an entire floor of the gallery devoted to his exhibition. In his self-portrait, Warhol gazes pensively at the camera. His fingers screen his mouth, and his head, which dissolves into black shadow on one side and is barely perceptible in silver on the other. This mechanically reproduced silkscreen not only removes evidence of the artist’s touch but also disguises his emotional presence. What is missing in Warhol’s flat garish reproductions is as important as what is there.

Along with the various free exhibitions, others with an entrance fee were also running. These included Jeff Wall: Photographs and Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris.

In all, it is an interesting place to visit!