Rhinovirus

I just got back from London last night and I am fighting off a cold. I catch colds when two conditions are present: (1) exposure to the virus and (2) stress.

One thing in London that was not stress is the new production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that has opened at the Royal Court Theatre, in Sloane Square. This is the theatre where the first English-language production opened in 1960, with Sir Lawrence Olivier (who was thought of as slumming at the time but was reinventing himself and revivifying the Royal Court Theatre) and directed by Orson Welles.

It turns out that Monday night is the cheap night at the Royal Court (£10 all seats), which happened to be a perfect night for me and my parents to go. The costumes are of the era (i.e. 1950s France). The new translation is strong, using a present-day flavor of English without violating the 1950s look of the characters and set. One of the funniest lines is a throwaway (as is so often the case in theatre). The characters are working in a first-floor office and a rhinoceros charges into the ground floor, destroying everything, including the stairs up to the first floor. The characters look over the railing into the destruction below:

To which one of them remarks "This was bound to happen eventually."

!

Maybe you had to be there--and I hope you get to be.

The cold I have now I caught from my father. The stress came from staying up late and waking up early. (My parents don’t stress me anymore--but I can’t explain all that in one blog post.) The next day we went to Kew Gardens. In the cab my father let four HUGE sneezes or, as the Wikipedia calls it, "aerosols of respiratory droplets." There in the sealed London cab careening through those twisted curvy streets I knew it was all over. The next night we saw the Woman in Black and the next day I came back to New York. American Airlines had put me on a later flight, and I felt the cold get me for sure over the Atlantic. The air on the plane was too dry and with screaming babies and people talking, I couldn’t sleep. I looked at my watch: People chattering away at 4:15 a.m. London time. Because of all the security at Heathrow, I’d had to check my bag, meaning it took 40 minutes to reclaim it at JFK. I took the train back to The Bronx, but by then nighttime construction was in full swing and it took 3 hours to get home (instead of the 1 hour it had taken me to get to airport the week before).

I got to bed by 3 a.m. and got up early to fetch Jenny from boarding before I went to work. I dragged into work a bit late and my sinuses majorly stuffed.

YouTube doesn't have a clip of Rhinoceros on YouTube, but it does have a clip of one of the costumes:



(This is what rhinoceroses looked like in France in the 1950s.)