The Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum was a museum that was quite different than any other museum I had been in before.  It felt more like a department store than a traditional museum, with exhibits from the 1500's and exhibits from just a decade ago right beside each other.  It was quite interesting though, and there were two areas of the museum that stood out to me: the architecture exhibit and the glass exhibit.  I had never been to a museum with these two types of exhibits, and they were both fascinating. 

The architecture exhibit had tons of fascinating model buildings and information about a wide range of cities across the world.  It featured the Parthenon in Athens all the way up to the bullet shaped building here in the financial district of the City of London.  I have always loved buildings and skylines, so this exhibit was extremely cool to go through and read.  The glass exhibit was also really interesting.  It is one thing to know how glass sculptures are blown and made, but it is an entirely new thing to see what neat objects can be made through that process.  There were objects in this exhibit that had so much fluidity that they looked like jelly fish, but they were made of glass.  It was awesome to see the different objects the museum had on display. 

One object in the glass section reminded me of one of the key subplots of The Beaux Stratagem: a large wine glass.

Please ignore Michele, as she just couldn't resist making a face in a picture (see 80% of the pictures that she took this trip).  This very large wine glass represents the large amount of alcohol that could be drank out of it, something that Mr. Sullen frequently did in The Beaux Stratagem.  Although Sullen's drinking was a huge character flaw, without it, he would have never caused Mrs. Sullen's unhappiness, and Archer would have never had a chance of getting with her and sealing his fortune.  Her horrible marriage was a key element to the plot of the entire play, and can be directly attributed to her husband's alcoholism.  Although Mrs. Sullen was very beautiful, it was obvious that Mr. Sullen (and even Archer, at first) was more interested in her fortune than her.  I think the glass can also represent that fact, that the outer beauty of it was not as important to them as what the beauty could contain, the fortune.  It makes the audience second guess the motives of the men around Mrs. Sullen (which if you weren't already second guessing, then you didn't understand the play at all). 

Also at the V&A, we saw some tri-fold exhibits on one of the lower floors (I'm kicking myself because I didn't take a picture).  I made an excellent joke about the song that Archer sang with Scrub about a trifle, which the director decided was so good that he/she made the end of the show as well. Nobody (Michele and Candace) appreciated that great bit of humor, so just as I did at the museum, I will show myself the door.