The Letter K // A Story Before Bedtime about Stories Before Bedtime

A Story Before Bedtime about Stories Before Bedtime

Excuse the lame title, it’s 3am and I am sleepy.

So tonight may have been one of the best nights I’ve ever had, it was just such an incredible series of serendipitous events coupled with a lovely live performance and Tom Hiddleston and Russell Tovey and meeting some incredible new people and making new friends. So many amazing things happened tonight; Athena and I just got back to our place and our smiles are ear to ear and unfading - I think the effect will take quite a few days to wear off.

We got there in the nick of time, just a couple of minutes before the lights were dimmed. Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani served as narrators of sorts, with a playful Ovid poem about how to search for, pursue, and hold onto a lover. They really made the rhyme work with their timing, and even when they messed up occasionally it was downright adorable and hilarious. Solemani’s exclamations and improvised comments inbetween Tovey’s rhymes in particular were a total hoot and had the theatre in stitches.

Niamh Cusack was the first to appear, doing a dramatic reading of Beauty and the Beast - a version I’d never heard before. The first few minutes were a bit of a bore, to be honest, but after a while it became more gripping and I got really into it (it is, after all, one of my favourite fairytales of all time). I had a couple of issues with the text itself (like how the era in which it’s set is unclear, or how the characterisation of both Beauty and the Beast was shallow and superficial and didn’t really grasp the themes of the story), but Cusack’s performance was lovely nonetheless. It was a bit dry at times, and her sitting at the table with a candle in front of her face didn’t particularly help in drawing one’s gaze; I found myself looking around the stage and noticing other things a lot of the time. Also, a couple of girls -undoubtedly Hiddles fans- were giggling incessantly during one particularly awkward bit of the story, and that made it even harder to focus. I think the choice of text was kind of poor, to be fair.

And then, there was Tom. Where to even begin.

He picked The Kingdom of Earth, a Tennessee Williams story about a working class man named Chicken living and working on a farm in TN; it’s all about the battle between the pious and the carnal, the mind and the flesh. Chicken is obviously a very earthly character, very in tune with nature and his body and rather unfazed by fiction and works of intellect. He likes things he can touch and feel, and he likes to give in to his body’s desires (there’s a whole bit about how having sex with a woman is the best thing ever) - and then he meets Myrtle, his ill brother Lott’s wife, and neither can resist the other for long. I could go on and on about how much I liked the text itself; I’m a huge Tennessee Williams fan, the man was a genius of epic proportions and everything he’s ever written is an absolute classic.

But I digress. Tom Hiddleston’s performance was astounding. He did the entire text in a heavy Tennessee accent, which was completed by the costume choice, a dirty white wife beater and blue overalls tied at his waist, and the grimy makeup covering his face and arms and clothes - the signs of a working man. After getting over the initial OHMYGOD HE’S RIGHT THERE NOT 4 METRES AWAY FROM ME shock, I began to notice how completely transformed he was, yet again. I’ve noticed this with all his cinematic roles, how there’s nuances of body language and the way he carries himself that just tells you who his character is without the slightest need for dialogue, and it was just as good - if not better - on the stage. The story had quite a few speaking characters: Chicken, his brother Lott, his wife Myrtle, her girlfriend from Memphis. Each of them had their own voice, their own distinctive stance, their own body language. It was amazing to watch Tom slip in and out of these characters so effortlessly, as comfortably as breathing. One moment he was Chicken, a gruff, surly, physical man, and the next he was Myrtle retelling the story of how she lost her virginity, and he looked every bit as lost and scared as Myrtle when she was fifteen - all of the emotion, the confusion, the desire was written clear as day upon his face. I was moved and amused and amazed by how incredibly vast Tom’s talent is; the man can just become anyone, anyone at all, and he’ll have all of the inner psyche of every character down to a friggin’ tee, even if he’s only there for a split second.

After the show we joined the myriad of fangirls (a big hello to any Tumblr people out there!) at the back waiting for autographs. Tom was getting the grime off him so he made us wait a fair bit, but in the meantime Russell Tovey came out and said hi and signed a couple of things, but didn’t stick around too long. I managed to get him to sign our Sherlock season 2 DVD and tell him he’s absolutely brilliant in it, and he looked up and smiled and said “thanks!” before waving goodbye and leaving. So that was super nice.

When Tom did come out, he was attacked by a bunch of Loki fangirls with Thor DVDs and chibi Loki bobbleheads and (like myself) copies of 1883 Magazine with him on the cover. Despite having wet hair from the shower and standing in the freezing -5 degree Celsius chill, he stuck around and signed as many things as possible, talked to fans, shook their hands, that kind of thing. I managed to get my magazined signed just as he was leaving, a sprawling doodle right across the edge of the cover, before he turned around with a confuzzled face and said “I should give someone the pen…” He turned to Athena and asked if she wanted the pen but she was too dumbfounded to speak so he gave it to another girl standing next to us. I shouted “Good luck on Sunday!” twice but don’t know if he heard, since he was dragged away and put into a car very swiftly.

I was going on and on about how I hope he wins on Sunday, and a girl who was standing next to me heard and we started talking about how we voted a bunch of times and how much he deserves the award; meanwhile, Athena struck up a conversation with the girl who got the pen off Tom. The four of us huddled together in the cold and geeked out about Tom and Loki and Thor and the costumes in Thor and just about everything in Thor - it was one of the most awesome, squee-filled conversations I’ve had in a while. We exchanged Twitters then and there, and we found out that we’re all cosplayers and scifi enthusiasts and Sherlockians and such, and one of the girls even lives really close to where we do. We spent another fifteen minutes in the cold talking about this and that, it was so truly inspiring and serendipitous, it felt like fate chased that moment down to make us all collide with each other.

We spent the rest of the night tweeting each other as we went home; never has the night bus ride felt this short. Athena and I were raving about the evening quietly, trying to contain our uncontainable excitement, all the while I was tweeting back and forth with the other two girls about cosplay and Dungeons and Dragons and teashops in north-west London.

We got home, put the signed magazine in the centre of our mantelpiece and the signed DVD in prominent display on the shelf in the living room, and reveled in this incredible night we’ve had, here in the city to end all cities, where magic happens every day.

Because it really feels like tonight was magic: a fantastic, intimate performance, a run-in with two incredibly talented actors, seeing Tom’s face up close (oh, the pictures don’t even do him justice), and making new super cool geeky friends, all in one night; if that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.

POSTED 3 months ago ♥ 29 notes