This is an online diary of the 2007 Post-Gazette Critic's Choice theater trip which took me and 39 PG readers to London. The headlines mark the days described, although the original postings were dated the day after. ("London Journal" is a small tribute to Boswell.) So far the trip has also spawned the following:
Review of 'Boeing Boeing.'
Interview with Mark Rylance, with past links.

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Tuesday, March 6, Day 1/2: Arrival, Vivian, daffodils and Bingo

I see by the PG home page that it's 24 degrees in Pittsburgh, but today in London -- which is considerably farther north, as the globe spins -- it's in the lower 50s. There was rain as we landed at Gatwick, but by the time our coach reached central London about 11:30, it was sunny, and I was using sunglasses as I hustled around this afternoon picking up groups of theater tickets.

	London headquarters for many PG critics' choice tours: Radisson Marlborough, with a few sleepless, jet-lagged Pittsburghers who've just arrived. Click photo for larger image.

More to the point, there are daffodils everywhere. I bring a PG group over at this same time every year, and there are always daffodils, in fact I promised the group daffodils, but this is unusual -- not just the early daffodils but the later kind, and some already browning with age.

They say it's been the warmest year ever -- well, Vivian says that, the guide who meets us at the airport, gets us on our coach and entertains us on the way into town with her take on recent royal scandals, politics, tax rates, plays and such. She says the daffodils are actually a couple of weeks early and that all the gardening books will have to be rewritten, so at least the publishing industry stands to gain.

Magnolia trees are out, too, and cherry and hawthorn. It really looks like England, just the England of several weeks from now.

My first chore was buying everyone bus and tube (subway) passes, and the system in place at the London Underground station at Tottenham Court Road, the closest to the Radisson Marlborough hotel we'll call home, required that each pass be a separate purchase -- nothing so simple as one swipe of the credit card, but the same ritual of key-punching and receipts and signing to go through for each pass. I was at the window for nearly 40 minutes, counting the time I stepped away to abate the steam that was building up in the queue behind me.

Seems to me a letter of gentle complaint is in order to whatshisname, the former Pittsburgher (is it Jim O'Toole's brother?) who runs London Transport.

Then a small group of us set out on an orientation walkabout, heading down Monmouth St./St. Martins Lane (with detours through the Neal's Yard area so I could show them the Neals Yard Dairy, aka the best cheese shop in the world) to Trafalgar Square, full of sun and young people and pigeons.

	It's a small world. At the London airport, we ran into peripatetic sometimes-Pittsburgher Tere Johns, here with my deputy tour guide, Bingo O'Malley. Click photo for larger image.

We swung up past the Leicester Square half-price booth to see how many shows might be available later in the week, then over to the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, where I left them, heading off with my deputy tour leader, Bingo O'Malley, to pick up tickets.

Bingo's a great addition to the trip, but I wonder how he's going to work out as a deputy. Within the first hour here, he'd almost been hit by a car (failing to look right as instructed) and he'd gotten lost retracing his steps to the hotel from our tube stop.

Back at the hotel we found we'd been given a nice, big, light corner room above Bloomsbury St., one of the perks of leadership, I assume. Now we're off to meet the group downstairs and take a tube or bus -- I think I'll assume traffic has eased and chance the latter, since it requires less walking -- to the Old Vic, where we'll see Robert Lindsay in "The Entertainer." It'll be a good test for him, keeping three dozen jet-lagged Pittsburghers hanging on Archie Rice's every twitch and grimace.

More later tonight.

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Still Tuesday, March 6, Day 1: 'The Entertainer,' Old Vic, Seven Dials and Trafalgar

Which day is this? I numbered my first London Diary entry 1/2, since we'd been here only a few hours. Now it's past midnight on that first day, so it's really Day 2, but of course I'm writing still about Day 1 -- which is what it still is five hours ago in Pittsburgh.

	We're going to see a lot of the Museum Tavern, our local pub: Me, Elizabeth Donohue, Bingo and Tere Johns. Click photo for larger image.

Got that? If it sounds confused, it's just my lack of sleep.

But as to that, I'd say Robert Lindsay and the company of "The Entertainer" at the Old Vic met the challenge posed in my first diary entry. I broke my usual rule, which is never to schedule a show for the whole group on the first night in London, and I compounded the innovation by choosing a serious play. As a result, there was hardly a member of our group who didn't admit to fading away for a bit, especially in an Act 1 that many of us found slow. Or did we find it slow because we were frazzled after our flight? Whichever, all of us were much more caught up in Acts 2 and 3.

And part way through, I realized that I'm not sure I've ever seen "The Entertainer" on stage before. All the images in my head seem to come from the movie, with Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice and, as his daughter, the young Joan Plowright, whom he later married. (I had to check with imdb.com to remember that Alan Bates and Albert Finney played the two sons.)

This biographical sidebar is the more justified because it was playing Archie Rice on stage that really catapulted Olivier into theatrical immortality. He'd already established himself as a Hollywood leading man and a Shakespearean star, but following the controversial 1956 thunderclap of "Look Back in Anger," his decision to reach out to the new Angry Young Men of the theater made him more than a star, it made him a dominant force.

Seven Dials used to be a fearsome place; now, you just have to be careful of the traffic. Click photo for larger image.

So seeing "The Entertainer" at the Old Vic, the theater so closely associated with Olivier, Guthrie and the New Shakespeare of the '30s, with Olivier, Richardson and the post-war flowering of the '40s and with Olivier and the fledgling National Theatre of the '60s, is to encounter English theatrical history coming at you from all directions.

And to cut to the chase, leaving nuance to my eventual review (press night is tonight, Wednesday, so we'll see plenty of reviews later in the week): "The Entertainer" is a big, important, epic play that combines state-of-the-family with state-of-the-nation. In American terms, I'd say it's most like "Long Day's Journey into Night," though in our impromptu seminar as we stood waiting afterwards for the bus back to the hotel, some in the group put up a good argument for "Death of a Salesman," too.

For a hardy few of us, that discussion carried on over pints and crisps at the Museum Tavern, which we quickly adopted as our local pub. But as I headed back up to my computer, I found another happy knot of Pittsburghers still going at it in the hotel bar. We are a hardy lot.

The pub is where the day ended, just before the next day began at this keyboard. But earlier in the day we'd encountered a very different slice of London theater history: Seven Dials. That's the busy intersection of seven streets in the Covent Garden area, once a veritable sink of poverty and crime, that is immortalized in Gilbert & Sullivan's "Iolanthe." The entire House of Lords is trying to persuade the shepherdess that blue blood and high station can merit love as much as the desrving poor. To quote from my doubtless imperfect memory:

Hearts just as brave and fair,
Can beat in Belgrave Square,
As in the lowly air of Seven Dials.

	Thalidomide Baby and Horatio Lord Nelson on plinth and column, respectively, in Trafalgar Square. Click photo for larger image.

That's British topsy-turveydom for you. For a modern example of topsy-turvey that shocks some, there's Trafalgar Square, where all the massive commemorative statuary is juxtaposed with what has been called a post-modern Venus de Milo. It's an unexpected tribute to the disabilities wrought by Thalidomide, on the theory that that's a history that should be memorialized as much as Nelson and the generals and kings. Marc Quinn's challenging work fills the fourth plinth in the square, which hosts different modern sculptures every couple of years.

Tomorrow (well, later today) we're starting off with a walking tour of all that, from Westminster back to the West End. But only after we load up for the day with a good English breakfast -- unless we discover its been outlawed by the same social legislation that is about to stamp out smoking in pubs.

More to come.

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Wednesday, March 7, Day 2: That breakfast, Westminster and 'Billy Elliot'

It's well after midnight, but this is about Wednesday, our second (first full) day in London, so I call it Day 2.

	Calories galore: the famous English breakfast. Click photo for larger image.

It's so late because some of us got to the Museum Tavern just in time to dawdle over our pints and crisps, and then, back at the hotel, we found several others still partying in the lounge, so we had another pint -- just like yesterday, in fact. Put those evening pints (with or without the crisps) together with the full English breakfast, and you get a lot of calories, yes, but also the framework of a fine London day. Then stuff that frame with a good walking tour, history and theater, and you have a day that's about as good as they get.

The hotel's breakfast buffet includes, as my picture partly shows, the several sausages, black pudding, fat-fried bread and the other ways in which the English eat more calories than Americans think healthy. But it does lay a solid base, giving you momentum right through the afternoon.

Gillian, explaining the pointy bits in front of a major example of same. Click photo for larger image.

That base well laid, we headed to Westminster, to meet Gillian, a very capable, funny guide for London Walks, the company I've been using with complete satisfaction since I started taking groups to London for the Pitt Informal Program in the 1980s. London Walks gives dozens of tours each week -- if there were time, I'd happily take a different one every day -- and for the group we'd booked a private version of Westminster to the West End.

So Gillian lead us past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey (her sensible summary of the history of gothic: "they couldn't build as high until they invented the pointy bits"), then down Queen Anne's Gate, past Sting's house, and out through St. James' Park. She was particularly good trotting out such Churchillian retorts as "madam, tomorrow morning when I wake up, I'll be sober"; "madam, if I were your husband, I'd drink it"; and "come back, I didn't know there was a choice." (I'll supply the set up for each in a future diary entry.)

Having successfully changed the guard, the band marches up the Mall. Click photo for larger image.

We weren't going to walk down to Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard because I frankly don't see the point, but lo and behold, the guard's attendant band marched right up the Mall past us and on toward Clarence House, where Charles and Camilla keep house.

We ended up at Trafalgar, where everyone went their different ways. It's one thing I love about our London theater tours, how complete novices start developing confidence and heading off by themselves after we've been here only a day or so.

Then I had to hop to it, rushing around to pick up tickets, book a group dinner Friday and do a dry run through the National Portrait Gallery, so I won't find any surprises when I lead my own little tour there tomorrow. It's a good thing I did. Of the key portraits I always focus on in my quick dash from York to Tudor to Stuart to Hanoverian, three are missing: Shakespeare (the Chandos portrait), Richard III and Cromwell.

In Covent Garden, flowers in the garden behind the actors' church contrast with the hair in the foreground, featuring colors not seen in nature. Click photo for larger image.

I sought out a knowledgeable guard and was told that Shakespeare's on tour (those theater people!), Cromwell's been minimized (his portrait replaced for now by a case of miniatures) and Richard ... well, I guess you'd say he's been un-rehabilitated, displaced from his customary place on the wall beside his brother, Edward IV, and enemies, Henries VI and VII.

I finally got my cell phone functioning, with a card that charges me only 5 pence (10 cents) per minute for calls back to the States, which is less than it costs for calls around London. A call to Mary, who's coming to join us tomorrow, and I learned Pittsburgh was being hit by snow while we've been enjoying temperatures in the 50s, lots of sun and flowers everywhere!

After a whirlwind session back at the hotel on the computer, I led the group back to Westminster for dinner at The Albert, just a short walk up Victoria Street from the Victoria Palace, home of "Billy Elliot," which was our evening's robust entertainment. I love the political side of it (there are interesting parallels to yesterday's "The Entertainer"), and overall I liked it a lot more than when I first saw it last year, but I still think it's going to take some adaptation to give it anything like the success on Broadway (where it's heading next season) that it has had in the West End.

And now at last to bed.

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Thursday, March 8, Day 3: Lots of art (NPG, RA, Tate Hogarth) and 'Man of Mode'

More sun! Are we using up the entire ration for March?

Today I led a quick tour of the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, from late 15th to early 19th centuries -- Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian, with its jumble of six wives, prisoners in the Tower, Civil War, Jacobites, the rise of America and one succession crisis after another played out against the more admirable saga of the arts and sciences.

	National Portrait Gallery, London 'The Death of the Earl of Chatham', by John Singleton Copley 1779-1781. Click photo for larger image.

The NPG was founded in the belief that a country's history can be told through its noted individuals, and while I recognize the limits of that, I'm old-fashioned enough to find it persuasive, too. Or maybe it's just that I have so much invested in my mental storehouse of British historical trivia.

Speaking of trivia, I have to admit that much of what I think I know of history comes from historical novels and a series of movies and TV documentaries. You could stock an Anglophiles Channel with such memorable docu-histories as "The First Churchills" (remember that, with John Neville and Susan Hampshire, I think, as John Churchill and Sarah Jennings, later Duke and Duchess of Marlborough?) and another personal favorite, the movie "Cromwell," which pits Richard Harris' puritan leader against Alec Guinness' saintly martyr, Charles I.

Visiting the NPG is another way to bring that rich history to life, like a quick dash through a whole year's worth of my Anglophiles Channel archives.

At the NPG, it's always fun to arrive at last in what I call the American room, where it's shocking to come upon a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington -- a reminder that he was, indeed, born British, until he and some colleagues chose to redefine themselves. Looming large on the far wall is the grandiose "Death of Chatham," in which our fair city's namesake, William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, having just delivered a speech in the House of Lords urging peace with the rebellious Americans, dies, with his three sons by his side and the whole political establishment looking on.

	Floris, one of the delicious shops on Jermyn Street. Click photo for larger image.

Having given his name to the western outpost of empire where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet, Pitt hoped to give America just enough freedom to keep it connected to the mother country. If he'd still been Prime Minister, perhaps the course of American independence would have run differently. As it was, it fell to his oldest (but very young) son, Pitt the Younger, to take up the reins a few years later and deal with the loss of America and the more important rise and rampage of Napoleon.

After a quick visit to the Victorian writers, especially that primitive, haunting portrait of the three Bronte sisters with the looming non-presence of their brother, for whom they denied themselves so much, I abandoned my group right at the start of the 20th century, and we went our separate ways.

I planned to come back to see the NPG's current special exhibit, "The Faces of Fashion" (though it turns out I never did). But for now my way was with Mary (who had just arrived) down Jermyn Street so I could buy a few shirts at Lewins and she could visit Floris, the parfumerie.

	Two concrete towers by Anselm Kiefer in front of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy, with Sir Joshua Reynolds looking at them amazed. Click photo for larger image.

Then to the Royal Academy, mainly to take advantage of its café, one of our favorite places to eat around Piccadilly (though not as atmospeheric as before its recent rearrangement). But we could not help but marvel at the rough-hewn, enigmatic towers of "Jericho" by Anselm Kiefer, temporarily dominating the courtyard. What would the original Earl of Burlington have made of them, installed in front of what was his London mansion? In fact, you can imagine that the large statue of RA founder, Sir Joshua Reynolds, is surveying them with amazement.

We wanted to see the RA's main current exhibit, "Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830," but figured we'd get back later (of course we never did). But our first priority was the giant William Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britian. I'm glad I hadn't walked the few blocks from our hotel to visit Sir John Soane's Museum, another favorite, because that must feel barren right now, with its glories -- Hogarth's "Rake's Progress" and "Election Series" paintings -- on loan to the Tate.

The National Gallery's Hogarths are there, too, and many smaller collections. It is astonishing to see so much in juxtaposition, to be reminded what a busy life of creation, controversy and self-promotion Hogarth lived. His is not unlike the story of Andy Warhol, in which personal talent both visual and commercial enable the outsider to storm the citadel of establishment art.

	William Hogarth, "The Painter and his Pug," Tate Britain By portraying himself without frills and comparing himself to an English pug, William Hogarth made a plea to support native artists in place of the fashionable French and Italians. Click photo for larger image.

The more specific parallel between Hogarth and Warhol is in the genius of multiplying images, creating art that could be duplicated, whether by engraving (Hogarth's original trade) or silkscreen. Each man introduced a new sort of democracy to art, even while necessarily catering to an elite.

The day included theater, too, with members of our group heading off on individual options. We'd passed on the possibility of a matinee in favor of Hogarth, but in the evening we were at the National Theatre for the perfect sequel to Hogarth's social satire, a contemporized version of George Etherege's Restoration comedy, "The Man of Mode."

Bitchy, stylish, heartless and funny -- apparently the wealthy London of Charles II (and of Hogarth's early-Georgian times) had a lot in common with the superficial life of celebrity and conquest of today.

On the way back to the Museum Tavern for our final pint (except once again there was another drink still to come back at the hotel) we actually encountered some rain, a comforting reminder of eternal London.

Maybe we'll have to pay for all this good weather tomorrow.

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Friday, March 9, Day 4: The actors' church, Geffrye Museum and an Inuit 'Tempest'

Off first to the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square, since Mary and Bingo want to see Maggie Smith in Edward Albee's "The Lady from Dubuque," skipping the PG group's show, the RSC's "The Tempest," starring Patrick Stewart.

	Known as the actors' church, St. Paul's Covent Garden is full of memorials such as these to playwrights Rattigan and Coward and comic genius Chaplin. Click photo for larger image.

You might wonder why I hadn't booked "Lady from Dubuque" for the group from the start. It's not a play I would choose for others, but Maggie Smith is one of those stars you normally go for, no matter what the play. But back before Christmas when I had to do the group's bookings, "Lady from Dubuque" hadn't been announced -- it just came out of nowhere.

Apparently it's much easier in London than New York to do this. In England, stars are all centered in London, since theater, TV and what there is of a movie industry are all in this one place, not coasts apart, as in the U.S.

In London, theater production costs are generally lower. The West End has more theaters than Broadway, of a variety of sizes. And since London theaters have their own staffs, they have an economic incentive to keep the doors open. (In New York, staffs are hired by each production.)

	Beneath memorials to Vivien Leigh and Hugh Beaumont, sprigs of rosemary for remembrance. Click photo for larger image.

The show I absolutely would have chosen for everyone if I had known about it far enough in advance is "Boeing-Boeing," a 1950s farce by Marc Camoletti -- not for the show, but for the all-star cast, led by Mark Rylance (Pittsburgh's Shakespeare friend), Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour. But of course I'm seeing it myself and talking with Rylance afterward. More about that Saturday.

Tickets secured, we decided to visit St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, known mainly for the high portico which provides the backdrop for Covent Garden's array of street performers and which stars in the first scene of Shaw's "Pygmalion" (and "My Fair Lady"). But you enter opposite from that portico, around at the west end, through a small closed-in garden (see the picture below in London Diary, Day 2).

	Mary and Bingo are distressed to discover the Theatre Museum is closed. Click photo for larger image.

Designed by Inigo Jones and completed in 1633, it has long been called the actors' church and is filled with memorials to many we remember well. Together on one wall are marble plaques for Terrence Rattigan, Noel Coward and Charlie Chaplin (Sir Charles Chaplin KBE, that is). Another wall memorializes Sybil Thorndike, her husband Lewis Casson, Donald Wolfit, Glen Byam Shaw and Angela Baddeley.

But most of the memorials are simple wooden squares of wainscoting with gold letters. Vivien Leigh's quotes "Antony and Celopatra": "Now boast thee, death, / In thy possession lies / A lass unparallel'd." Beneath the panels to her and producer Hugh Beaumont, some sprigs of rosemary ("for remembrance") were being prepared for a memorial service that afternoon.

It's a lovely church -- unostentatious, bright and human -- a place full of memories and somber thoughts for theater fans.

	The Geffrye Museum of interior decoration and gardening is housed in 1715 almshouses. Click photo for larger image.

And it's open. That's more than you can say for the Theatre Museum, long established right in Covent Garden but recently closed by its big brother institution, the Victoria & Albert Museum -- closed with little consultation with others and no apparent attempt to find a way to save (and even improve) an important resource, or at least explore alternatives. There is some sort of plan to disperse the collections elsewhere in the country or bury them in storage, but it is of course absurd that London, arguably the greatest theater city in the English-speaking world, no longer has its own Theatre Museum.

Mary and I then headed out to a London treasure that Americans may not often see, the Geffrye Museum in Shoredith, a 1715 almshouse converted into a museum of interior decoration and gardening, with rooms in the styles of many different periods from Elizabethan onward.

	Part of the PG group at Brown's, a convenient and bustling brasserie in Theatreland. Click photo for larger image.

While we were there, we actually saw a few raindrops, but the sun was back before we walked out to wait for a bus. What remarkable weather!

Then to dinner with most of the PG group at Brown's in St. Martin's Lane, a cheery brasserie-style refuge in the heart of Theatreland. And on to "The Tempest," a very unusual beast which I can best describe as a cross between a Philip Glass opera, early Ingmar Bergman and an Inuit love story. It was enough to send us back to Brown's for dessert and a few more drinks. We're really getting into the swing of London.

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Saturday, March 10, Day 5: Portobello, 'Equus' and Mark Rylance

What do you do on a London Saturday? You go to Portobello Market, of course -- or at least that's what many thousands do, speaking most of the languages of Europe and beyond.

	Looking down into Portobello Road Antiques Market on a March Saturday. Click photo for larger image.

It calls itself the largest antiques market in the world, and I suppose there are other cities that could dispute that title, as well as varying definitions of "antiques" to hash out. But as you flow with the thickening crowd northward from the Notting Hill Gate tube stop and finally see the market proper, sloping down the street before you, you aren't disposed to doubt the claim. And if you arrive around 10 a.m., as we do, and tear yourself away around noon, you see even larger crowds as you depart.

The market itself seems endless, with infinite treasure (or bric-a-brac) in many rooms. The street is lined with stalls -- fronting the shops on the left, standing free on the right, where there are some honest-to-God homes, though how the inhabitants stand the weekly assault, I can't imagine.

Some shoppers (here, it's Mary) are interested mainly in linen. Click photo for larger image.

Each doorway opens into a small building packed with many stalls, most of the buildings with enough packed into them to serve by themselves as satisfactory antiquing destinations in Pittsburgh. When Mary and I spent four months in London in 2000, we came to Portobello enough Saturdays to think that we had eventually passed by every stall, although with the maze of interlocking buildings, the length of the street and the many side-streets, as well, we could never be sure.

At the top of the street, there's a greater emphasis on traditional antiques -- silver, glass, porcelain, linen, jewelry, furniture, paintings, sporting goods, brass, maps, some books -- but as you work your way down further, humbler collectibles (prints, cigarette cards, toys) start showing up, then ordinary household goods and market staples (food, flowers). At the farthest end, which most tourists never reach, it's a regular London street market, full of just about everything.

	Some shoppers are fascinated by sports. Cricket balls (top, in red and white) have the friendly heft of baseballs; I can't seem to get enough of them. Click photo for larger image.

All along the way there's stuff that's neither antique nor truly collectible -- souvenirs, I guess you'd call it, like replica pub signs. And tucked into odd corners are small food stalls to provide sustenance for the weary shopper or vendor, plus the occasional pub or, eventually, vendors on the street selling the kind of street food that never tastes as good as late on a Saturday morning at Portobello Road.

A sizable part of the PG group came along, but we necessarily said farewell as we plunged into the maelstrom. Mary and Bingo and I proceeded the only way you can, picking out a distinctive shop front a way down the street, agreeing to meet there in 30 or 45 minutes, then doing it again and again. How else to accommodate individual tastes? I'm always poring over books, maps and sports paraphernalia; Mary loves silver, linens and lots more; Bingo seems mainly to collect people.

My chief treasure is a late-19th century map showing what it calls the five great religions of the world, the fifth of which is "heathen"!

But there were plays to see.

Some shoppers haunt the cafés in the market; Bingo notes the Heinz bottle, ubiquitous reminder of Pittsburgh. Click photo for larger image.

By now the group was on its own, handling the tubes and buses and snarled streets of the West End with aplomb, but I still felt a parental pride as they all showed up on time for our matinee, Peter Shaffer's "Equus." The starring attraction was an odd couple from the Harry Potter movies, Harry and his piggy Uncle Vernon, aka Daniel Radcliffe and Richard Griffiths, here playing Alan Strang and Martin Dysart, young client and psychiatrist.

Griffiths had been out sick earlier in the week, but we were lucky he was back, as his was the best performance. Radcliffe was just fine, limited as an actor but an appealing, sympathetic presence, and the rest of the company was generally OK. (The horses were splendid.) More about all this in my review, coming soon.

In the evening, everyone scattered to shows of their own choosing. Mary, Bingo and I were joined by the peripatetic Tere Johns for "Boeing-Boeing," the 1950s Marc Camoletti farce starring Mark Rylance. It was a delight, providing more than enough belly laughs to balance the grimness of "The Entertainer," "Tempest" and "Equus." More about this to come, especially since there is talk of bringing "Boeing" and its all-star cast to Broadway.

	Theatrical couple Claire van Kampen and Mark Rylance. Click photo for larger image.

We learned that from Rylance, when he and his musician wife, Claire van Kampen, invited us for a post-show drink. Saturday night meant every restaurant was crammed, so we ended up at the Groucho Club, in which actors in West End shows get membership privileges. The club is named, of course, for the American who said he wouldn't belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Mark talked about Pittsburgh, about the two theater companies he has been connected with since leaving the artistic directorship of Shakespeare's Globe a year ago, about the movie he just made (playing the father of Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johansson) and mainly about two new plays he's writing, one about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, the other about Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick.

Yes, he has hopes of bringing the latter to Pittsburgh, as well as another "original practices" Shakespeare. I'll have the whole conversation in the paper, soon.

This has been more than long enough for a diary entry.

Just one day to go -- we head back to Pittsburgh Monday.

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Sunday, March 11, Day 6: Flower Market, rugby and farewells

Our last full day. And London is still sunny! We've hardly remarked on the sun the last few days, we take it so much for granted.

	The Columbia Road Flower Market starts here, at Columbia and Ravenscroft. You take a breath and plunge in. Click photo for larger image.

Mary had to leave this afternoon, so we went in the morning to one of our London favorites, the Columbia Road Flower Market. There are street markets all over London on different days of the week -- Portobello, which I wrote about yesterday, is just one of the better known. Mary and I especially like the different East End markets, especially Spitalfields, a mix of food, clothing, books and junk.

We didn't make it there on this trip. Indeed, looking back, there was a lot we hoped to do but didn't. I didn't even get to the British Museum, just two blocks from our hotel. To some extent this is because I had to devote a lot of time to the group, checking ahead on each thing it would do, to reduce unwelcome surprises. But it's also due to the nature of endless London. When Mary and I spent four months here in 2000, our list of places we wanted to visit was longer when we left than on our arrival.

The Columbia Road Market is just on Sunday morning. Though nowhere as large as Portobello, it was thronged, the good weather bringing people out in droves. As you approach (it's a walk from whatever bus or tube you use), you see happy bearers of plants and flowers coming the other way -- and as you get closer, you hear it.

As the name implies, there are flowers for sale. Click photo for larger image.

"What is that? What's wrong?" asked one of the group members who had come along. But it was just the noisy hurly-burly of the sellers, singing out, "Just a fifa!" "A tenna for these, the best in the mahket!" "Only a fifa fa this luvely try uv payonies!" (My Henry Higgins notation is a poor attempt to catch the cockney.)

Napoleon or some other snotty foreigner called England a nation of shopkeepers, but actually it's a nation of gardeners. At Columbia Road, the market stalls line the road on both sides, with barely space for the crowd to push through, while shops in the buildings on either side sell gardening gear.

At the far end are some potteries we especially like, although the busts and garden pedestals and such would hardly fit in our air luggage. Where are the leisurely steam ship crossings of yore when you need them?

Where, in fact, is leisure?

Well, no time for that.

After putting Mary on the tube to Heathrow -- she was more dutiful about meeting her Monday class than I was -- I spent some time catching up on this diary. I even watched some of the final day's TV coverage of Crufts, the world's biggest dog show, something like nine or ten times bigger than New York's Westminster. Of course the commentators, with their breathless excitement, remind me of nothing so much as "Best in Show."

	Wind your way down Columbia Road to the potteries at the far end and you find cafes in sheds. Click photo for larger image.

Then Bingo and I set out for the Rosemary Branch Theater in North London, one of the many pub theaters that make up the "Fringe," London's off-off-Broadway. Only a few West End theaters perform on Sunday, but many Fringe theaters do.

We got there in plenty of time to eat in the pub and watch on TV the end of the England-France rugby match in the Six Nations championship -- England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France and Italy, playing a round-robin. Thanks partly to misinformation about remaining time, Wales had been edged by doormat Italy the day before. But things went better for the British Isles this day, as England came on strong in the second half to beat France, a welcome outcome for those around us in the pub.

Not that Bingo and I could understand everything going on. I once read a lot about rugby in preparation for a promised interview with Tony O'Reilly that never came off, but it's still largely a mystery why they do certain things. Rugby is to American football as cricket is to baseball -- familiar but strange.

That might describe the play we saw, too -- Marina Carr's "On Raftery's Hill," a dark tale of hypocrisy, hatred, dependence and hidden incest in an Irish midlands family of three generations.

Then back to the hotel to share a final drink and farewells with the group and hear about the different things others had done that day. One group had been to evensong at Westminster Abbey and then ridden the stately London Eye at twilight, which is the best time. Another had taken the London Walks tour of Greenwich, traveling by boat from the Tower of London. Others had been to Parliament to hear debate.

Some had been balked of their London Walks plans by unexpected delays on the tube -- repairs often take sections of lines out of service on the weekend, so you need to check ahead or leave enough time to travel another route.

That's what we have to do starting early tomorrow: travel.

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Monday, March 12, Day 7: Westward back to reality

There is something unreal about six days on vacation, let alone spent in London amid its bustle, theater, pubs, street markets, museums and monuments. Pittsburgh will bring us back to reality. Fortunately, I've been keeping up with Pittsburgh news daily through the Post-Gazette Web site, so I knew the most important news -- Pitt's two wins and one loss in the Big East tourney and its seeding.

	Past and present, mysterious and mundane: A ghost ad looms high above a cheery old telephone booth (itself a dying breed). Click photo for larger image.

We were on the bus to Gatwick Airport at 7 a.m. for what would be for me a 22-hour travel day, counting the two extra hours I spent at the Pittsburgh airport hoping that US Airways would find my bags where they'd gone astray in Philadelphia (I'd seen them there between planes).

"I can't believe it!" a girl said, pulling her bag off the carousel: "I checked my baggage through Philadelphia and I didn't lose it!" I laughed, confident my own bags would quickly appear, but I learned otherwise.

I was especially anxious because I'd packed a set of unreplaceable student exams ... and what's worse, exams I'd worked on during the flight from London. But the bags eventually showed up on my porch, late the next morning, so all's well that ends . . . well.

Poor US Airways, and poor us, in thrall to US Airways. I use it all the time, and I don't usually complain, but this past week has been hard, what with the computer meltdown the day before we left and its lingering effects in London, where we had to wait interminably Monday morning, before, clearly understaffed, they could check us in.

Stagecraft secret revealed: So this is how Mary Poppins flies into the Prince Edward Theatre! Click photo for larger image.

As everyone knows, for the modest of means, which is most of us, modern air travel is recreating the conditions of steerage a century back. You get what you pay for ... if even that.

On the way to the airport, our guide/handler, Vivian, kept up a light accompaniment. Driving down through the early morning West End, she told us she had made her West End debut as a performer at the Palace Theatre (in Cameron Mackintosh's own debut as a West End producer, "42nd Street") and her final appearance at Queen's Theatre ("Tommy").

Vivian's best story: In one show, the whole cast was listed in alphabetical order, which occasioned a protest from an actor who thought himself more important than the others. "If you changed your name to ar--hole, you wouldn't have this problem," she told him. And she says that has remained his nickname ever since! "He's appearing in 'Mary Poppins' now, but his roles aren't any bigger," she said.

	The journal writer (right) and one of his heroes, in Leicester Square, where the tumult on weekend nights would be familiar to the Hogarth of "Gin Lane" and other portraits of urban tumult. Click photo for larger image.

Which reminds me that earlier in the week I took a picture outside "Mary Poppins" of a construction crane, fantasizing that that was how Mary did her flying each night.

In my March 8 entry, I quoted the Churchillian punch-lines provided by our other guide, Gillian, on our London Walks tour of Westminster: "madam, tomorrow morning when I wake up, I'll be sober"; " if I were your husband, I'd drink it"; and "come back, I didn't know there was a choice." I haven't had any emails supplying the set-up lines yet, so I won't post them here. Instead, I'll post the quiz in my Thursday In the Wings column and hope for responses to that.

I exit this London Diary thinking of my picture of a ghostly sign, faint above a traditional red telephone booth. That's London: antiquity and the mysterious amid the usual and everyday. It's a comfort to know it won't change that much before I get to go back.

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