Today: coffee, Ashmolean museum, unpalatable lunch in Hall, exhibit at the Bodleian Library, Vanessa Redgrave, Wit

My mother is here visiting me for a day and a half so we made the most of our day today. We had coffee out then walked through the covered market. From then to the Ashmolean Museum, where we saw Mughal paintings and drawings, which were small and very detailed and quite interesting, accompanied by descriptions that found the right balance between explaining and being short enough. From there we went and got some rolls to make sandwiches for our train trip tomorrow morning. At 12:30 we went to lunch in Balliol's Hall. Stupidly I took the fish option, since I don't eat meat and the vegetarian option -- a baked potato stuffed with lentil curry -- didn't look very nice. Anyhow, I ate the carrots and the dessert of chocolate cake. The room itself is very lovely, which is why I took my mum. She enjoyed it, and also didn't mind the food as much as I did. On our way back from Hall we detoured through the Bodleian Museum where they had an exhibit on about romance and knights and the effects of those stories on later art & literature. The narrative they were trying to string together didn't interest me as much as the beautiful books themselves: on display were a first folio Shakespeare, several handwritten illuminated manuscripts, the first book printed in the English language, and several other weighty tomes. I guess these are all part of the Bodleian's own collection (the two items that were lent from the V&A were listed as such, so I assume everything else was from home, though I didn't look closely at every single tag). It pleased me to wonder what these books do when they aren't part of a special exhibit. And presumably dozens if not hundreds more of equally unique artefacts. Are they on some dusty stacks in the back? Surely not, but what? Individual steel boxes in a humidity- and acidity-controlled room? Do rooms have acidity levels? Then, lawyer that I am, I was thinking about the insurance implications of having all these books about.

Back to my room for a fifteen-minute rest and then across the street to the law faculty, where Vanessa Redgrave was speaking about human rights and Shakespeare. She spoke almost without ceasing for three hours (including a half-hour question and answer period). She spoke about her family a lot, about King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, about Virginia Woolf, about various plays and movies she'd been in. She's played Cleopatra of A&C five times, and directed the play three times. It gives you a certain perspective, and she had a lot of interesting insights, I thought, about the play. One of her takes was that Antony is not as lovestruck as he's often played, that in fact he's highly political and strategic, even though he is truly in love with C, at least at the end, but that part of what he's going through is an intense fear of Octavius, because Octavius is 20 years younger than him, and because his soothsayer has told him Octavius will win (and Redgrave cautioned against thinking of the soothsayer as someone who should be "rubbished off" as a quack). So when he turns his boat around it might be his own fears guiding him, not his beloved queen. She said, think of him when he's the Antony in Julius Caesar, driven and savage. He's the same guy. Anyhow, she talked a lot also about politics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. My mother asked a good question about how, given that Redgrave had just said that one shouldn't overly demonstrate the bad qualities or good qualities of a character one is playing but let the audience think for themselves a bit, had she played the very bad Volumnia in the film version of Coriolanus that has just come out? She gave a really interesting answer. Originally she told Ralph Fiennes that she couldn't do it, because she couldn't connect to the character. He said he knew she could. She thought back to when she was six years old, during the Second World War, and how she'd wished she could be a grown-up and go and fight, and defeat Hitler. She then thought about the military people she had met during her several trips to Sarajevo and Kosovo during the war, and how they had been good people, and finally she found the inner understanding of this woman who believes in war and honour above all else.

I had not in any way expected that the talk would last from 3 to 6, and we had reservations for a play that started at 7:30 so we ran off to eat some pasta before finding the theatre. The play was Wit, put on by students from Trinity College. It's about a very severe and unsociable poetry professor who is diagnosed with end-stage metastasizing ovarian cancer. She identifies so much with the researchers, since research has been her whole life, that she lets them do all these horrible and painful things toher in the name of progress, pretty much understanding that it won't help her at all, though they of course try and elide that part when getting her consent. They were pretty good. I thought they were better at the intellectual parts than the emotional parts. The one who played the old woman who is the poetry professor's own poetry professor was my favourite, and that brought me back to thinking about Redgrave, who told us that her first job out of drama school was a job that paid seven pounds a week to put on a different play each week (and you had to provide your own costumes!) and that they'd hired her because they'd seen, from the class's graduating performance, that she could convincingly play old people. So I wondered if the one who played the old professor might be the most talented of the lot. The main character was also good, she did a very believable job retching and writhing, but there was a kind of emotional depth that I felt was lacking. Also, a play called Wit should elicit some laughter, and there were some funny parts but they didn't resonate enough. The old woman got the most laughs, in what was also a fairly sad scene right at the end - and her performance actually made me cry, as well. Part of that maybe is the problem with a small audience, fewer chances of someone taking the step of being the first person to start laughing, and when no-one else has laughed it seems like sometimes the crowd finds it harder overall to discern the comedy bits. They were there. The play itself was interesting, though not amazing, and the players were likewise very competent.

Got home at 9:30 quite exhausted.