The most convenient flight itinerary home was a 23 hour layover in London. This way we get a direct flight home to San Diego.
Being just short of a full day, what do you do? We decided on another West End play, this time a revival of a little known play "The Physicists" by Friederich Durrenmatt. Don't worry, I never heard of him either. The play is a critique of physicists' complicity in developing the atomic bomb and other military weapons, inserted into a farce about an insane asylum.
When the play focussed on farce, it was great fun (although just a teensy bit misogynistic as several plot points involve (a) strangling pretty, sympathetic female nurses and (b) the unsympathetic characters of un-pretty women). As social critique, it is interesting mostly because of the incoherent argument. I overheard one man behind me "explaining" how the play critiqued physicist's development of the bomb. The problem was, the actual lines in the play didn't support his thesis. Instead both this man--and the play, itself--took as some starting axiom that physicists were morally insane.
I was disappointed, not by this particular point of view, but by the fact that this thesis was merely assumed rather than explored. This made the social critique not only shallow but also incoherent. This was brought home as later, back in our hotel room, we caught a bit of Monty Python. At their best, Monty Python could make razor-sharp social critiques in just a few words, also in the context of farce.
We'll catch eucharist at St. Martins-in-the-Field this morning (the main services at St. Pauls or at Westminster are too late in the morning for us to catch our flight); our flight out is 3 pm and we arrive back in San Diego roughly 6 pm. That'll be about 4 am our body clock time, so we'll be wrung out.
But it's been a good trip. We're very happy.
