London Day 2 – V&A Shoes Pleasure & Pain, Oxford Street, Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch, National Maritime Museum

10/13/2015

We went to the V&A Shoes Pleasure & Pain exhibit today. We'd originally planned to go yesterday to take advantage of the 2-for-1 deal, but the Churchill War Rooms took much longer than planned so we ran out of time. Plus Dad had no interest in seeing "some shoes." He went to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich today instead.

Photography isn't allowed, so I'll just have to summarize:

As evidenced in fairy tales, shoes can transform a person. The right pair of shoes can give a person hope, powers, and in some cases, a whole new life. Across the centuries, across different cultures, shoes were a symbol of what class you were in. If it’s intricate, silk or sequin embroidered, it meant you had the money to pay for such shoes.

Madame de Pompadour popularized high heels that had the heel centered on the insole. This made walking very difficult because most of your weight is resting on your toes, so you have to tiptoe around the whole day. But, like other cultures, women walking in tiny steps were considered attractive.

The more impractical the style, the more popular it was with women because it showed that they didn’t have to walk around—they had the money to be chauffeured around. Indeed, many had to use their maids as crutches if they needed to walk at all.

Mules were considered a fetish style in the 1700s because it was easy to slip off in the boudoir.

Laces on shoes were also a fetish style because it brings to mind tight lacing (restraint), and the potential for release.

On one of the exhibit signs, it says “Shoes is sex.” To which I said, “Red is sex.” It’s a quote from Kinky Boots. I’m very glad we saw Kinky Boots last night, because it really reinforced everything I’d learned from the musical.

Boots became popular for men and women in the Napoleonic Wars because soldiers wore them as part of their uniform. Civilians would wear boots as a way to show their support for the war.

Cinderella shoe from Disney’s 2015 movie by Kenneth Branaugh. It was made specifically for Lily James, as it was made of Swarovski crystal, which is not malleable. It meant that these shoes can only fit the person to which it was fitted for, much like bespoke shoes.

Imelda, wife of ousted president of Philippines – “I don’t have 3000 pairs of shoes. I only have 1060!” Oblivious and clueless. She’s called the “steel butterfly” for her ability to survive in turbulent times.

Louis XIV first to popularize red soles and heels at court. Originally only the people in his exalted court could wear them, but soon other royal houses across Europe were copying the style. It finally trickled down to the middle classes. So I guess Christian Louboutin didn’t come up with it first then.

Chinese women bound feet to a tiny, tiny 7.6cm! They'd accomplish this by breaking the bones in the foot and wrapping their toes under their feet. Yuck!

Tallest platform height 28cm. Platforms were popular with different cultures across the globe at different points in time. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans all had their platform shoes, and in Europe, it was a way for privileged people to get around the dirty streets as most roads weren’t paved and were probably lined with horse shit. The Italians had very tall platforms, which not elongated their height but meant they needed more fabric for dresses to cover the hems, which was another way to show off how wealthy they were—fabric was very expensive back in the day!

On the upstairs gallery, it went into a more in-depth exhibit of how bespoke shoemakers make the shoes. They first take precise measurements of a person’s feet, taking meticulous notes of bunions and imperfections on the person’s feet (Sir Lawrence Olivier had bunions). How they walk, what’s their gait, where they lean their weight. Then, they carve a “last” out of wood. From the last, they make paper patterns to mold around the last. In the mid-1900s, some genius figured out to insert a steel pipe inside the heel so heels wouldn’t break as easily anymore. That really gave rise to affordability, and the masses could now afford high heels. 

We took the tube over to Oxford Street to shop. 

When we got out of the Bond Street tube station, we saw a lady yelling at the policeman (there’s always a policeman attending the turnstiles to make sure no one’s trying to get away with going in for free). The policeman followed her out to the street, made her splay against the wall as he searched her. He let her go, they chatted for a bit (she was smiling), then he made her splay against the wall again…as he arrested her! She started screaming, and as we moved away from the tube station, we could still hear her down the block. Angel was quite entertained. We speculated that she didn’t pay the fare and slipped out behind someone else as they swiped their oyster card, and the policeman caught her. But since we didn’t stick around to see what happened next, that’s all, folks.

Shopping took a whole heck of a lot longer than we anticipated. But it was worth it. I thought we’d be in Primark for a good 1.5 hours. We ended up staying there for 3 hours!

The English love their potato chips (they call 'em crisps here). There's so many wonderful and wacky flavors that'd you never find in America!

We dropped Mom off at the apartment and went out to see Hamlet at night:

Last July, I’d waited til 3am in the morning to purchase the tickets. Right when I clicked into the system, I looked around frantically for seats. The only two seats left for the ENTIRE run of the play were way across the theater from each other. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I booked the tickets just to make sure I actually did get seats. Then, I decided to go back in to see if there were perchance any seats I’d missed. Preferably two next to each other. But when I tried to go back into the system, it said there were 20,000 people in front of the queue before me.

Holy fuck.

There were only single seats left by the time I got in to buy them, so Angel and I sat way across the theatre from each other. 

The couple sitting by Angel were talking about Hamlet, and it went something like:

Wife:

Husband: What?! That was a major spoiler!

Wife: What?! You don’t know the plot of Hamlet? You want a spoiler? THEY ALL DIE!

They were an older couple, probably in their 50s. How is it they didn’t have to read Hamlet in school??? Considering it’s England!

Ciaran Hinds was super awesome as Claudius because Angel thought he was really annoying. I thought he was very insidiously devilish, worming these ideas into other people’s heads.

Ciaran Hinds

The stage production was very good. The props served to aid the actors’ performances; the set decoration looked like the early 1900s but some of the actors are wearing modern-day clothing, which was kind of confusing. I really liked the bit when Benedict Cumberbatch leaps onto the table and pretends to be all crazy to Polonius. It definitely played to Benedict Cumberbatch’s strengths, like when he played crazy. It’s very reminiscent of Sherlock.

Side note: Benedict played Rosencrantz last year and I'm so bummed to have missed that! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was one of my favorite plays in high school; I used to go around quoting the play with one of my friends.

The seats at the Barbican Theatre are some of the best I’ve ever seen. I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to see Benedict because our rows were R and S, which is pretty far back. I’d even considered bringing binoculars! But our binoculars broke (so much for lifetime warranty) so we didn’t bother bringing them along.

The elevation of the seats—and the fact that the stage is elevated—is such that even a tall person sitting in front of you won’t block your view. The stage is so elevated in fact that I didn’t even really have to crank my neck down—it was almost at eye level! The balcony front rows (I think A-K probably) extend far out, so if you’re sitting in row A in the first balcony, you’re actually closer to the stage than if you sat row A in the stalls (stalls in UK is the ground floor seats and generally considered the best. But in this case, I think the balcony front rows are the best). Even though I was in row R, I could see everything almost 20/20, including Benedict’s very expressive facial expressions. 

There’s this kiddie castle with human-sized nutcracker-ish soldiers where he’s pretending to guard a fortress, mimicking stepping up and down stairs:

They are very strict on no photography or cellphones; they will confiscate. Ushers stand at the ready to tell people to turn off their cells when the performance was about to start. When the production first premiered, Benedict Cumberbatch had to go outside the theater to beg people not to use their cellphones and cameras to take pictures because it’s highly distracting to actors when they’re trying to deliver their lines. I’d really wanted a picture of him on the stage, especially when the whole cast was holding hands and taking their bows. But alas, I refrained from doing so out of respect for Benedict’s impassioned plea. The girl sitting in front of me, however, had no such compulsion. She was snapping away with her smartphone. Out of the sea of audience members, there were probably five Asians in total. She was one of them.  

At the end of the play, with the deafening applause and triple encore bows, Benedict Cumberbatch motioned us to quiet down. He then made a plea for people to donate money to help the Syrian refugee crisis. He said thanks in advance to all the people donating, and for us to kindly "fold it" (he motioned snapping a bill in his hands...as opposed to dropping in small-denomination coins) and drop the money into the buckets staff members would be holding outside the theatre. That got a good laugh out of the audience.

I'd arranged to meet Angel outside her entrance door on the other side of the theatre. When I got to the door, however, she hadn't come out yet. Turns out, she was bogged down by everyone in front of her queuing up to donate money, she couldn't get out! Whereas in my section, no one donated.