London 3, 4

October 3, 2010

Sunday morning. Skipped yesterday because I got home too drunk and wet and happy.

Strolled most of Saturday, to the National Gallery where I was stuck by painters I had never noticed before, and returned to old friends like The Shrimp Girl and Salisbury Cathedral from the Water Meadows. Sat a while in Trafalgar, realizing one could have a pretty full tour of London just sitting there. In the evening I went again to Covent Garden to see the Royal Ballet do Onegin. It was perplexing to me. By the end of Act II I was in to the story and the characters, but I must say that, though I love dance, classical narrative ballet has always struck me as superfluous. It’s about perfection of execution, and the execution was indeed perfect, but there must be something original and vital to be executed. In narrative ballets, good dancing is sadly coupled with very bad acting. I remembered from my days in The Nutcracker Ann’s admonitions to dress the stage and stay active and to stay in character, and I could not avoid seeing those things in Onegin. Is ballet acting deliberately bad–I mean, is it part of the form?–or is it that the dance takes so much effort they leave the rest to chance? I tried to push down the word “preposterous,” but it pretty much was. The Nutcracker is mostly fantastic, and for fantasy ballet works fine, but for anything that is supposed to be “real,” is just doesn’t. Unless your story is about swans or fairies, ballet is not your medium. The work dates from the 60's, but it seemed to have take nothing from a milieu within sixty years of its own time. I suppose that if one likes Eugene Onegin one might be interested in a dance version, but why, exactly? Without a great book shoring it up at every point, it is a very silly dance. Beautifully done, of course. Onegin was wildly handsome. Plus, I had a stupendous seat, At intermission, digging my ice cream out of its carton with one of those little spades they give you, I flipped a big dollop of chocolate onto a Japanese grandmother’s skirt. She was so polite she was going to pretend she didn’t see it happen.

Pouring rain when I left the opera house. Drank at the Freemason Arms, and thought of Jason. Drank at O’Neill’s on Long Acre, which was loud and merry, and where I met short dark Rick and tall red Bruce. I bought them a round of what they were drinking, and they bought me untold rounds of Sambucco, which I’d never had before. Bruce is an engineer and Rick was leaving for Japan in the morning, and had not yet packed. Bruce was a hugger, and soon I was being enveloped in drunk boy hugs and plied with Sambucco, and I was happy. Why does one leave one’s front door except for that? In the driving rain on Southampton, the Sambucco and the cider rose up in conflict, and I vomited lustily, but I was happy even while engaged in that. What did O’Neill’s have that the ballet did not, I wondered, seeing that one was a delight and the other had to be endured, considering what one had paid for the ticket? I suppose the answer is inspiration. On the stage nothing was new. In the bar, everything was.