Waiting...

Ben, Jill, Rob and I went into London yesterday to see Waiting for Godot. Actually, we didn't go to see that play - we went to see Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart star together in a play, and it just so happened that the play was Waiting for Godot.

Having got home and read the wikipedia entry on the play, it appears that there are numerous ways you can interpret it. The most obvious interpretation to me was that the play is a metaphor for life (although not my view of life) - nothing of consequence happens in the play, and the point of it is that there is no point - we're born, we go through life one day after another and we die. As I said, not my opinion at all, and it made me feel quite sad in parts.

McKellen played Estragon (with a fantastic Lancashire accent - just how he would have sounded if he'd never left Burnley) and Stewart played Vladimir, while Simon Callow played Pozzo and Ronald Pickup played Lucky. I would have paid to watch such great actors just stand on a stage and do nothing, so it was nice that they put on a play while I was there, but I can't say I would be desperate to see this play again. Apparently it's one of the most influential plays of the 20th Century - which only solidifies my view that the enjoyment factor of a play/film/TV show etc is inversely proportional to the amount of critical acclaim it receives. Remember The English Patient? And Gone with the Wind? And Casablanca? And Cabaret? And Children of a Lesser God? And... you get the idea.

As we were standing in the lobby before the play started I felt something sharp on my thumb and wondered how on earth I could have been burned by a cigarette while indoors. I raised my hand to see what it was and there was a wasp attached to my thumb. I shook my hand up and down to the point of hilarity and when I looked again only the wasp's stinger and half its body were still there. We were half an hour early for the play, so I had time to remove the stinger and hot-foot it to the nearest Tesco for some TCP and cotton pads. So if you were sitting in the balcony of the Theatre Royal Haymarket yesterday afternoon and wondered what the awful hospital smell was, that would be me.