The wifi in this hotel is pretty unreliable, and it is not cooperating with the posting of pictures. I will try again tomorrow.
This has been quite a long day but will probably have the shortest blog post. It’s currently 10:09pm, and we are still on our way back to the hotel. We just left the RSC Swan Theatre on the banks of the river Avon in Stratford (we will be back in Stratford in a scant eleven hours). The students are still buzzing and as full of energy as I’ve seen them this late. That excitement is the direct result of the adrenaline that can only come from the engagement with as powerful a piece of art as we just experienced. I’ll talk about the play in a bit.
On any bus tour, there will always be at least one day that is a transit day. The tour company does their best to keep the actual bus trips as short as possible, but at some point, there must be a long haul to get to one’s final destination. This was one of those days, BUT the experiences we had today more than made up for the three and a half hours (one and a half in the morning, two in the afternoon) that we had on a bus.
After checking out of the hotel this morning, we traveled to Bath for our last bit of Roman England, but it was quite a finale. The physically infirm have visited the location of the city since long before the time of the Romans. The legend goes that the great Briton King Bladud was sent to Athens by his father, but while Bladud (9th century BC) was there, he contracted a nasty case of leprosy… as one does. When Bladud returned home, he was promptly exiled (THANKS, DAD!) and started working in the fields around present-day Bath. The legend claims that Bladud’s pigs also somehow caught leprosy… it is a legend, after all…, but Bladud noticed that they loved rolling in a particular patch of mud. One day he noticed that the pigs’ sores were healed, so he went over and felt the mud… sure enough, it was nice and warm and showed healing properties. When the Romans invaded, they built a sprawling spa complex over the original Briton site… and then a medieval town… and so on and so on. In 2006, a luxurious new spa hotel was built to take advantage of the only hot springs in England. We met our guide Lindsay who showed the students around the city; they then had free time to explore the Roman Baths and the rest of the sites Lindsay pointed out in the morning.
After our second long bus ride of the day, we checked in at our hotel in Coventry, had a quick dinner, boarded the bus again, and drove to Stratford for our evening of theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Unfortunately, the Rome 2017 Season (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus… all productions sharing the same set and under the artistic vision of a single director) has long been sold out, and despite EF’s best efforts, we could not get tickets. However, much like the entire trip itself, EF found a remarkable replacement.
In an effort to bring more world drama to the RSC repertoire, they commissioned a playwright modern playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig to write Snow in Midsummer, a modern translation of the traditional Chinese drama, The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth. The play was originally written and produced by Guan Hanqing during the Yuan Dynasty (13th and 14th centuries AD)… so a couple of hundred years before Shakespeare. And Shakespeare could have taken a lesson from Guan on how to craft a narrative. Shakespeare wrote beautiful, moving poetry and crafted some of the most human characters in the history of the English language, but the guy just could not write plots (ask your ninth-graders about Lady Montague’s death at the end of Romeo and Juliet); in fact, Shakespeare never wrote an original plot… he borrowed stories from other sources and adapted them for his audiences. Our students were literally on the edges of their seats during the carefully-plotted story of a woman who was executed for a crime she did not commit and the subsequent curse her ghost levies on the town that wronged her. Not only was the story gripping and moving, but the performances and theatricality caused more than one student to gasp audibly. To top it all off, the lead character Dou E was portrayed by Katie Leung, a talented Scottish actress better known as Cho Chang in the Harry Potter movies… yes, she kissed Harry Potter.
So today saw a blend of Ancient Briton, Ancient Roman, Victorian England, Yuan Dynasty, and Modern Chinese cultures. I’m not sure Ms. Neely and the Global Studies program could have planned it better.
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