"We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.
Saw Trevor Nunn's revival last night at the Haymarket and adored it. It's a very wordy play (I must admit I've never read it; I've seen the film, but even that was years ago) and yet it didn't feel overlong or difficult to understand - the direction and the performances made it feel fun and witty, plus Jamie Parker and Sam Barnett's chemistry was astoundingly good. I've seen both of them on stage before but together they were something else. It was actually my third time seeing Barnett on stage, as I first caught him in Dealer's Choice a few years back at Trafalgar Studios and then in Women Beware Women at the National, which I found actually a pretty disappointing production, though he was good in it. Oddly, Parker was in The National's preceding Middleton revival - The Revenger's Tragedy, a couple of years previously, which I adored. We sat terrifyingly close to the front, with all the blood and gore that entailed, and Parker made a very stoic and yet very present-feeling Hippolito. He has a lot of gravitas and I'm sad I missed his productions at the Globe, especially as I've never seen anything there.
However, wonderful theatre or no wonderful theatre and regardless of the excellent catch-ups I had with two excellent friends, the HIGHLIGHT of my brief soujourn to London was the Lynchian nightmare that is the M&M World shop in Leicester Square. So much unecessary sweet-based merch. Why is the green M&M "the sexy one"? Why did I just manage to find a website for said website that features said cartoon lady doing a sexy dance? So many questions, so little time. IT HAS FOUR FLOORS. Nobody needs that many M&M-themed boxer shorts/dispensers/hoodies/oven gloves/etc. Some of the products they'd put M&Ms on were so obscure that we didn't even know what they were.
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I agree about the M&M shop. It's like a hideous vortex into a parallel dimension where sweets are designated questionable character traits (sexy, stupid, arsehole) and kept in colour-separated tubes or boxes. (I understand assortments of jelly beans - different flavours! - but individual compartments for sweets that taste the same is SEGRAGATION.) It's horribly compelling for an empire built on a nugget of chocolate in a sugar shell. Where's the product? It's CONFECTIONARY! It's like the Disney store if their only output were a fruit pastille with an 'attitude'.
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