Contemplating the Nature of Time

What's it all about then? As far as I'm concerned it's Tuesday night but when this is published it'll show as a Wednesday posting. Time passes.

Went to see 'The Big Life' this evening. The evening didn't start off too good with me hobbling round the West End trying to avoid being bumped by the crowds wandering around aimlessly. A five minute walk from the tube station took a lot longer than it should have and I was exhausted by the time I met Chris at the theatre - walking is such an effort. Not the ideal way to start an evening at the theatre I'd been looking forward to for a long time.

'The Big Life' is billed as "a feel-good ska musical which transports the plot of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to 1950s London" beginning with the characters arriving in England on the Windrush from the Caribbean. So, it's 2005 outside but the 1950s in the theatre. Except we're watching it with 21st century sensibilities.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, great fun, loud and always on the move. In a couple of places it seemed a bit raw and not quite right and the pace of the production made clapping a bit awkward since the scenes changed so quickly. But that aside, it was a good show. And it ended with snow in Picadilly Circus as our new friends were out for a night on the town.

There was a very strange moment in the second half when one of the main characters tries to see a professor he's corresponded with and, after checking with said prof, the secretary says something like, 'learn your place nigger' before slamming the door. There was absolute silence at that point, just for a second or two, like we'd all been slapped in the face, before a few murmurs started, cut short by the character starting a soulful, bluesy song about the difficulties of living your dreams.

Hobbling back to Leicester Square tube station I cut through Chinatown and that gave me two thoughts. Firstly, I remembered 'Hot Neon' a song about sleazy Soho from the first Rock Follies series in 1976 and that cut into a discussion I'd had with MTSB at Flashbacks last Saturday about porn cinemas in Soho in the 70s and 80s and how there weren't any there now. And he's quite right - I recall seeing big red neon 'XXX' signs all over the place back when I first moved to London 22 years ago, but you just don't see them any more. Probably for the best. Strangely enough that then made me think of the Bowie song when Time 'falls wanking to the floor'.

My mind's been a proper Tardis this evening.