It was my annual trip to the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion today. I enjoyed it more than I had expected from looking at pictures in advance.

A short walk along the Serpentine Lake is Christo's Mastaba, blipped elsewhere, made out of painted oil barrels. Impressive for its scale but an oddly inert bit of sculpture, I thought.

Then a trip across central London to the Globe Theatre to see Emilia, a feminist play about England's first-published (in 1611) woman poet. Little is known about her so there is plenty of scope for the playwright to imagine her life and the play drew on speculation that she was Shakespeare's Dark Lady. All the parts, female and male, including Shakespeare, were played by women, a neat twist in the very place where the opposite was true at the time she was alive. 

I started off enjoying the rabble-rousing feminism then got a bit irritated by the play's unsubtle polemics. At one point a double-helixed military helicopter hovered over the theatre, rendering speech from the stage inaudible. Actors and audience all stood looking up into the sky and as it moved away, Emilia's comment, 'It's the men,' had the audience laughing and cheering.

But I ended up thinking that if you can persuade 1,500 people in a theatre to feel fired up about oppression - and racism and xenophobia were clearly included - that's got to be better than standing on the town hall steps with a placard. 

I'd be interested to hear the views of others who have seen it.


London's odd new pregnant building in extras.




Black and white in colour 169