The Audience – The End

Kelvin and I met Trell and Ina at the movie. When they got there, they were told the show was sold out. Ina has a gift for getting into a closed show. I saw her walk into the darkened theatre to check it out for herself, the light streaming through her blonde tight curls that can only go Afro-style. That potlight shining through that mass of hair?  She could have been part of the play.   Then she disapperaed. She must have gone back and told them there were empty seats for they got in

Kelvin and I were there early enough to walk the Chinook mall for an hour.  His walk was only as far as the Orange Julius stand, only a few shops away from the IMAX.  There are some leather cushions on a round bench backed by a pillar.  He said he would rest there.

“I thought about getting a hot dog, while I was waiting,” he said when I returned from my longer walk to fetch him some Superdrug theatre sweet treats. 

“What stopped you?” 

“I am not sure if it was the $4.85 or the eight steps I had to take from here to the counter.”

He wanted to take the ramp to the theatre.  When we got to the top of the ramp he got  one of his biggest disappointment of the day.  The ramp led to the parking lot and not to the theatre. At this point, I learned to tell when a person really needs their walker and when it is a casual tool, since I would have hopped on the walker chair and taken a ride down that ramp.  That is not the way it is done when you really need a walker.

I am still trying to figure out what makes me want to see a play over and over again, as opposed to the joy of seeing a new play, maybe each day for the rest of my life.  Last night I threw myself into Peter Morgan’s script as though I had never heard it before, but that is impossible.  Instead I watched for what was going on outside of the scripted words – watching Helen Mirren for the body language answers she gives to questions, her eyes, the turn of her mouth, the way she holds her arms, all of the social cues that are a conversation in themselves.  I think the line in the script that describes the Queen as saying absolutely nothing about a circumstance but you know absolutely how she feels is what I was watching. 

Rebecca and Tonia, you are the ones I know have seen the show.  The second time through, everything is the same, but with a little more pleasure than the first time – the flip of her plaid skirt when she turns to bar in Balmoral to get a drink for her Prime Minister, the high arch of her arms when she shows how a Scottish dancer holds her hands as she leads the hunt/parade, the look on her face when we learn that she always had Scottish governesses, one so well loved that she had her sleep in the same room with her until she was 15. 

The downside of seeing the play for the second time is that now I have some questions:  I must goggle both Harold Wilson and Sir Anthony Eden to flesh out the more colour to their caricatured personalities in the play.  Tonia said it best. Where, oh where is the history buff, Greg Bates, when I need him.

Arta