In my Health & Society class, one of my professors kept on talking about a play she had seen called “The Madness of George III.” She described the play as a mix of the history of medicine and royalty. This is a line from the Wikipedia summary: “The play depicts the relatively primitive medical practices of the time and the suppositions that physicians made in their efforts to understand the human body.” Two things I love? Perfect. Since I have been meaning to see a play in London, I searched the Internet for cheap tickets. I found 15 pound tickets in the balcony seating and came to terms that I will not get any closer for a price like that. I convinced my friend Zach to accompany me and we picked today’s date (February 28).
As I originally thought the play started at 6:30, Zach and I departed at 5:30 to make sure we could pick up our tickets and get our seats in time. Well, we found out two things pretty quickly: (1) The play did not start until 7:30 and (2) We got our seats promoted to much closer ones. My 15 pounds went far!
Since we had an hour to waste, Zach and I got dinner at a local pub. We got fish and chips, which was actually Zach’s first since being in London. As the time got closer, we made our way over the Apollo Theater and took our seats.
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| Inside Apollo Theatre |
The play was amazing and I truly enjoyed every minute of it. It had its comedic parts, such as having the mad King reading Shakespeare’s King Leer (Oh, the Irony), but overall it had a serious tone to it. The actor that played King George III, David Haig, was spot on. I mean, he convinced me he was mad! Also, it illuminated how useless medicine was back in the day. The only medicine the ‘doctors’ could provide the King was blistering or bleeding and they thought that by sampling his stool, they could understand his sickness. It just shows how far medicine has come since then.
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| Inside Apollo Theatre |
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| The Madness of George III |
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| The Madness of George III |
I am super happy I took my teacher’s recommendation to go see it and now I got my play fever goin’ on. Maybe I’ll go crazy and see a musical next! I could easily see Wicked or Les Miserables for 25 pounds…
On a different note: I don’t know if you remember or not, but I have been posting about Occupy London, that has been camped outside of St. Paul’s for a while now. Well, on my way to the play I picked up London’s free nightly paper and saw that the occupy has been broken up! It was forcefully evacuated at 3 AM this morning. I am going to have to go now to check out what St. Paul looks like now without the filth and tents cluttering it!
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| The Evening Standard's article |
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