龙火龙青龙白

There comes a point during a 5-hour play when your seat just isn't comfortable any more. You can try and shuffle around (although this is highly unlikely, as by this point you will most probably have become one with your chair), but the fact is that humans were simply not designed to sit through any form of entertainment for more than about two hours. That said, and despite the need for subsequent back surgery, the play in question was actually worth the physical pain. It was "The Dragons' Trilogy" by Jonathan LePage, which I went to see with schmandrea at the Barbican on Saturday.

The evening got off to a great start, as on my way to the Barbican, I had to interrupt a mobile phone call to a friend when I spotted a music student (the Barbican is next to the Guildhall School of Music), carrying a seriously cool violin case. "Uh-oh", I hear you say collectively. "Luggage junkie!" Well, you're right.... I want one..... although my violin's undergoing surgery right now, so it'll have to wait a while.

Anyway, there was dangerous moment when I might have floored the annoying usher at the Barbican Theatre for making me go back to the cloakroom to leave a bag of purchases from Chinatown. This followed another unfortunate episode, during which the security guy at a cinema in Whitechapel made me check a bag of bagels at reception, because he insisted that it was the company's policy not to allow food into the auditoria. "But they're bagels! I'm hardly gonna sit there eating bagels, am I?", I protested to no avail. And, yes, I guess it's possible they might have read my previous blog entry (see "today's calories" below), although I think I wrote that after. In any case, I managed to contain myself and humour said annoying usher, and we traipsed back to the cloakroom, left my stuff and went back to said annoying usher, who then proceeded to suggest that schmandrea should also go back to the cloakroom to leave her bag of tennis balls. "Well, couldn't you have said that when we were here the first time? What a friggin' waste of time!", yelled schmandrea, and then *WHACK*, she headbutted the woman!

Oh, OK then.... so in a far more entertaining, imaginary universe, that's what would have happened. In reality, she managed to get away with it by saying she'd sit on them, which probably wouldn't have been any less comfortable than sitting on those chairs for 5 hours....

Anyway, the play was excellent- an epic spanning some 50 years and three generations, following characters at the intersection between French Canadian, English, Chinese and Japanese cultures in three Canadian cities and performed in four languages: English, French, Cantonese and Japanese. Although the Cantonese was appalling. And one of the actors sounded like Jean-Claude van Damme. I think maybe he was Belgian... oh, and there was no kung fu....