On the 30th of November I'm going to London to see a play. I'm flying into Gatwick (early) the morning of, then flying out around 10:30 the morning after.

Should I just get a room near Gatwick?

That depends if you want to do anything after seeing the play or not. Gatwick is quite a long way out of London and the trains from London to Gatwick don't run very late.

So if you want to go out for a meal or something after the play it would be better to stay in the centre of London.

I've just checked, I was wrong about the trains. There is in fact one train an hour from London Victoria to Gatwick Airport all through the night (the journey takes 40 minutes).

You can get train times here http://www.railtrack.co.uk/

It would still be better to stay in London though.

TimeOut used to be pretty good for a quick rundown of what's on in town.

Is there anything in particular you are looking for or wanting to see in London?

I already know what I'm seeing.

What The Night Is For

Shouldn't be a huge shock, either

Well, particularly I'm worried about making sure I get to the airport in the morning, but I would otherwise stay in London somewhere without a second thought. Basically I don't want to have to choreograph this that carefully, and I don't want to be totally used up for the next 48 hours after doing this (admittedly insane) trip.

LOL, now why didn't I see that coming (considering your tagline)

Basically I don't want to have to choreograph this that carefully

You shouldn't need to choreograph it that much, after 06:00 there are fast trains every fifteen minutes that go direct from London Victoria to Gatwick. You just need to make sure you wake up...

http://www.gatwickexpress.com/

If you decide to stay near the airport there are dozens of hotels around the immediate area. Make sure when you book that they have a courtesy bus from the airport to the hotel, most of the big ones should have.

There is a handy list of Gatwick hotels here:

http://www.best-hotel.com/airport/gatwick.html

For cheap hotels, I use www.laterooms.com for good deals, been really good for finding cheap deals at the last minute.

Cheers,

Paul.

I'm flying to London to be there for 28 hours; It's probably a little late (not in that sense) to worry about being cheap

But thanks, I will look.

Somehow I failed to find this list. Thanks. I guess I should decide today what I'm going to do.

I'm flying to London to be there for 28 hours

You're flying from the US to the UK just to see the show ?

You're flying from the US to the UK just to see the show ?

In a word, yes.

I applaud you, and your sense of abandon.

If you're flying out 10:30 AM next day, I think you may have trouble. The check ins are long due the new anti terror regs: if you have to be in Gatwick from out of London this would mean getting out of Victoria at some ridiculous time like 6 AM or even earlier. I am not sure what the Gatwick express is like these days (it used to be quite good) but I don't know what time the trains start.

If you are in central London to see a play, then I doubt there's going to be many trains coming out of town to Gatwick at the time the play finishes. If it's a 7 PM start, and the play runs to 10:30, you will maybe only just get enough time to get out of the theatre and get a drink before the bars start to close: you'll then have to get the tube across to Victoria to catch the express.

I think your best bet would be to look at the times of the Gatwick Express trains out of Victoria station before making a decision. Don't underestimate how awful public transport is in London at the moment - a large number of tube stations are closed due to safety issues caused by the Fire Brigade strike - you may find the tube station near the theatre is closed!

I hope she's worth it, then!

If you're flying out 10:30 AM next day, I think you may have trouble. The check ins are long due the new anti terror regs:

They aren't that bad, BA for example recommend you check in two hours before an international flight.

if you have to be in Gatwick from out of London this would mean getting out of Victoria at some ridiculous time like 6 AM or even earlier. I am not sure what the Gatwick express is like these days (it used to be quite good) but I don't know what time the trains start.

The trains from London to Gatwick are some of the most frequent around...

The last train each day is 00:30 and then the first of the day is at 04:30, from 06:00 to 20:00 they are every 15 minutes, the rest of the time they are every half an hour.

http://www.gatwickexpress.com/view.asp?pageid=4

If you are in central London to see a play, then I doubt there's going to be many trains coming out of town to Gatwick at the time the play finishes. If it's a 7 PM start, and the play runs to 10:30, you will maybe only just get enough time to get out of the theatre and get a drink before the bars start to close: you'll then have to get the tube across to Victoria to catch the express.

Not true, he'll have plenty if time to make the last train. There are trains every half hour until 00:30.

Don't underestimate how awful public transport is in London at the moment - a large number of tube stations are closed due to safety issues caused by the Fire Brigade strike - you may find the tube station near the theatre is closed!

There aren't actually many stations closed:

http://www.londontransport.co.uk/tfl/strike/firefightersstrikemap.pdf

The station nearest the theatre is Piccadilly Circus, which is not effected by the strike. It's not far from there to Victoria, 25 minutes by tube even at the worst time of the day.

The next strike, if it goes ahead will end on 30th Nov at 0900.

Gareth

I have a nice close seat for the evening performance, but someone who saw it told me that I want a seat elsewhere, so I'm thinking of getting a seat further back but closer to center for the matinee. The Dress Circle is sold out for both (not shocking; The tickets, while not cheap, aren't exactly expensive either, and the theater isn't that big... plus it's a Saturday.).

I wish I had time to stay longer, but at the moment I have too much stuff to do that has to be finished by the end of the year, and I'm running out of time. Bad enough that USAir 767s don't have at-seat power, so if I'm awake I don't know how much I'll be able to get done in the air.

I'm sure this is going to work out badly, because that's sort of how my luck goes.

im hoping youll write up a nice review upon your return. id love to see it, but i can barely afford to leave town atm.

I got back a few hours ago. Technically I suppose I probably couldn't afford it either, but no matter now

I'll try to write up something on the whole trip later this evening, or maybe tomorrow if I end up needing sleep badly. 50 hours from when I left my front door to when I returned; 28.5 hours from touchdown to takeoff.

I'm glad I'm still "young".

50 hours from when I left my front door to when I returned; 28.5 hours from touchdown to takeoff.

Yeah, that time-dilation effect is a real killer, isn't it?

coo, thanks.

Well, I left my house something like 4 hours before the flight, which was another 7. Then the flight back was about 8 hours, and it took another 1.5 to get "into the country" and get home. I wonder where I fudged such that I lost an hour? (it should all add up to 50

Like I said, clearly time dilation. You must have approached the speed of light during your journey at some point.

50 hours from when I left my front door to when I returned...

...and 50.5 hours from when you logged off of the BBS to when you logged back on.

(The website for the play is here)

Review will follow, this is a summary of the play.

What The Night Is For is a look at two people who met in a book club in New York City and had an extramarital affair 11 years before, but haven't seen each other since until tonight.

Roger Allam plays Adam Penzius, an architect with a summer house in Pennsylvania and an apparent desire to enter works in international competitions, while Gillian Anderson plays Melinda Metz (affectionately known to Adam as Lindy), a woman who gave up her "published" poetry for the life as the wife of the heir to the Metz Bicycles fortune and the father of his children. Roger is an award-winning actor who is almost certainly underappreciated due to his costar, and of course I expect you all know of Gillian from her 9 years as Dana Scully, a character whose love life we knew almost nothing about.

As the play opens, we find Adam and Lindy eating dinner, the food they'd ordered from room service, in Lindy's hotel room. She's in town, 200 miles from home and somewhere in the U.S. midwest, for a conference; He's here to try to sell a proposal to a potential client. It is, he says, an easy contract, one he can have his associates work on as an easy source of money to leave him free time to work on designs for competition. Over the course of the performance we find that this isn't quite the truth.

Things progress rapidly and the two end up exploring potential for a continuing relationship again in their future, and all sorts of things start to come unwrapped: Lindy had moved away without telling Adam when her husband moved to the midwest, but had she stayed for just one more week of book club he intended to leave his wife for her. Instead, when she didn't show up that night he went home, found love with his wife, and ended up getting her pregnant. She was a dancer, and went on the road the next night; He didn't hear from her for 2 months, and when she came back things weren't the same, as she was acutely aware of what she'd need to give up to have and keep the child, which she did. He claimed that if his wife could be like the woman she was the night she got pregnant, perhaps he wouldn't be in the hotel room that night.
When Lindy asked if his wife would suspect anything when he was away on trips, he surmised she wouldn't even notice, however, it was apparent that he felt guilt over the child,

Previously unbeknownst to Adam, Lindy had also contemplated leaving her husband. She had given up her poetry, published in the form of xeroxed copies, stapled and handed out in the Village, and ended up the mother of the future bicycle fortune heirs; Her guilt was in the form of the need to support her husband in his run for Senate, then ongoing, and not be caught in any questionable situations (hence her reason for having Adam in her room that night for dinner instead of dining out).

Her husband calls her more than once in the room, and finally she loses it and yells at him when he tells her he can't sleep because she's away. She notes that he can't sleep any other time either and that he always finds a way to blame her, whether it's this or his anxiety over her keeping his focus away from business.

Afterwards, she warns Adam that they "don't have much time", that her husband is only about an hour away. When he tells her he doesn't understand, she lays out for him her problems with bipolar disorder and how her husband dealt well when he discovered her problem at a dinner party she hosted, after they were already married. Her husband, she surmises, will recognize that she had an episode and come to take her home. She'd gone off her medication for the weekend before seeing Adam. Lindy tries to get Adam ready to go, but he persists, wanting something more. Neither was aware of the other's interest in something more than just wild nights of passion after the book club.

When Lindy coaxes Adam into revealing that he'd be quite content to keep company with her on the side again, she tells him that's not enough, that it needs to be all or nothing. The medication which keeps her sane also leaves her sexually dead, and it's problematic to manage going off it for a few days. He first suggests that things need not always be about sex, but she pushes that she can have plenty of mundane with her husband. She tells him she'd be taking all the risk, and him none, so he proposes what she posited as a strawman: leaving their spouses and living their lives together, him working and her writing again, finally living the life they want instead of sticking with what they have (and settled for in the first place for fear of being too undesirable to even find a better match) to avoid stepping on the toes of the people around them. Instead, they spend their time rationalizing away any chance at happiness.

She agrees, but when he tries to get her to just go now, she hedges, and proposes waiting a week. He again persists and she agrees that in 5 days, they can be together. He reluctantly takes this answer, still wanting to take her with him now, before her husband arrives. She tries to get him to leave, and the lights drop with her prodding him to leave her and give her the 5 days to prepare and him trying to bring her along with him now.

(A summary of the play was already posted separately; This is my own review of the play)

Featuring only 2 people and a stage which we get (4) different views of throughout the night but whose setting does not change, What The Night Is For keeps the focus on the story of two former lovers, what they were, what they might have been, and what they still hope to be. It reveals the flaws they hadn't previously shared with each other, their rationalizations, needs, and the problems each had with their respective lives as those had turned out.

The stage was dominated by a square platform, underlit between acts with blue lights as it rotated to provide a changing perspective on the hotel room as the evening went on. Off-stage action was involved a few times, and was used to good effect (getting ice from the hallway, showering, pushing the room service cart back into the hallway). Likewise, good fun was poked at the problems people have with technology: the alarm clock in the room would periodically "randomly" go off, playing music suitable for dancing, of course. And the hotel bar was raided more than once throughout the night.

Of course, there's more to a good play than the set... There's costumes! We get to see Gillian start in a nice suit, stockings and heels, with a well-coifed hairdo, and progress to mussed hair, then to nude (but under the covers of the bed), in satin pyjamas, and finally in a bathrobe. Roger goes from suit to nude to shorts and a shirt, to bathrobe, and finally back into his suit and ready to leave. The suits portray the airs each put on to see the other for the first time in 11 years, and of course the progression to night clothes, and then to bathrobes, shows their increasing level of openness with each other as the night wears on and the layers of insulation each had wrapped on themselves to steel against the rigors of life wear off.

The most important part of a good play is a good story. This one is a fully fleshed out story that no doubt is familiar in its concepts to many people in long term relationships: the idea that you settled for someone who showed an interest when your ideal mate was out there, perhaps already known to you and feeling, like you, that the other would never have you. The effects of throwing away much or all of their established lives to be with each other, on both Lindy and Adam, and on their families, are an inevitable part of this, and the part which no doubt keeps many couples together where at least one partner feels mismatched.

The story isn't tedious, nor the dialog ponderous. It flows well, and while more light-hearted than poignant, more humorous than serious, it still portrays the emotions of the characters in a manner which allows the audience insight into their actions, and an opportunity to sympathize with their plight as a result of their choices. It's certainly not the best work, but I would certainly say it's good; I connected well with it.

Finally, if your actors do a poor job, even a good play can be ruined. Certainly, this was not the case here. You could argue that I'm biased, and there may be some truth to that. However, I found both Roger and Gillian to be very believeable in their parts, to offer a very real feel of a couple who hadn't been with each other in 11 years. I think that perhaps the two didn't have quite so much of a spark as Gillian did with David Duchovny, but the circumstances here are different: in that case we saw a relationship build over time, with an undercurrent of attraction being masked by the professional relationship the two expected to share, whereas here we see two people reconnecting after many years apart. What was there worked. Certainly this didn't present the opportunity for the range of acting that "House of Mirth" required of Gillian when she portrayed Lily Bart through her descent from the upper crust of society, but she delivered an impressive performance nonetheless, offering recriminations after their first intimacy of the night, as well as an impressive bipolar episode while on the phone with her husband, even if the tirade was not quite as memorable as the scene in the X-Files episode "Beyond The Sea" where she marches into Luther Lee Boggs' cell and delivers a verbal wallop to the prisoner. Likewise, I understand Roger to be an award-winning actor, and while not familiar with his other work, his portrayal of a man able to see past Lindy's faults and continue to desire to bask in the joy of their relationship felt very real to me.

So, while this is perhaps not the best vehicle for the range these actors are capable of, both do a good job of filling the roles of the characters they play; The audience is definitely drawn into their story as they accelerate through an evening from cordial to intimate, calm to panicky, and finally to uncertain.