7 May: Aye-aye-ai!
Up early and off to the London Zoo. This involved an arduous hike up from Camden Town in the rain. The sogginess of the weather meant that for much of the day, I was the only person around. Being alone in the lemur house made a disquieting parity between looker and lookee – I mean, there was no illusion about who they were staring at. One Emperor tamarin and I played Gene Simmons with our respective tongues. My favorite small mammal had to be the acouchi, a large rat-like creature with Bambi eyes and an endearingly tentative hopalong gait. Extremely creepy interlude in the “Moonlight World” exhibit (which lives in a basement), where it was me, the bats, and one mentally defective window cleaner. Many horror films have been built on less.
Marvelous scarlet ibexes and other great cranes. In the reptile house, we are introduced to a taipan, the most deadly snake in Asia – its waterbowl reads “Pussy.” Many enclosures give information about the personalities of the residents – Jim, the buff-faced gibbon, likes blondes, Dick the male okapi is going to Hampshire on a siring trip. The okapis were marvelous – there were two babies. Outside their house, parents were implored not to bring strollers in, as they upset little Jemima. I suppose after the Tannhauser incident, okapi keepers must be pretty jumpy – they never know what’s going to send an okapi over the edge.
I thought I had given myself plenty of time to make a second attempt at Highgate, but by the time I got back down to Camden Town, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. Damn and blast!
That evening’s entertainment was A Midsummer’s Night Dream with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican. All in all, it was a pretty good production – though it took a while to grow on you. The guy in the big brown pleather coat with tree branches instead of a head and hands deserved a big round of applause. I liked the big flies on the walls to indicate the smallness of the fairies – which were thick-ankled, twitchy sort of fairies in brown woolen jumpers and blue hair. Eldritch, instead of gossamer. Saving Titiania, who apparently shops at Fredericks of Hollywood. I didn’t like her at all. She rolled around the stage like a cat in heat, rubbing her hindquarters against everything she could – you didn’t believe she needed any exotic flower juice dropped in her eyes to become an undiscriminating slut. Oberon was good, a small-time hood… Bottom was fabulous – in fact, the rude mechanics were far and away the best part of the show – something of a miracle, that. Each one of them was very individual, and you could feel that each of them had something real at stake in getting their play on at Theseus’s wedding. The young lovers were as interchangeable as the young lovers usually are. The audience was very young – I found out by talking to the girl sitting next to me that they had been bussed in from school as part of their A levels. All in all, they behaved well – though there was a certain amount of tee-heeing when the young lovers got stripped down to their underwear. Ye Gods, have English 17-year-olds never seen people in their underwear before?
And miracle of God, no lines in the ladies loo. The stalls must extend seventy-five miles underground…