Apparently “tomorrow” was a bit of dream-promising, just a tiny bit of planning beyond my means.  Sadly, I did write a long and glorious review of the first show we saw (a week ago), but it’s gone the way of all mortal (and unsaved by Blogger) things and disappeared to lands unknown.  Let me try an exercise in resurrection….

It’s a week we’ve been in London now, and we’ve seen as many plays as we’ve been here days.  Bliss, really, is what it is: dramaturgical bliss.  We’d been here for less than 36 hours when we frolicked blithely off to our first show (well, I frolicked, while D merely galumphed in my shadow) at the brand new Bush Theatre at the old Shepherd’s Bush Library.

The space not so much brand new, in fact, as half-born. It’s a no-frills evening in a space brought up to code, but not yet transformed into a professional theatre.  You walk in to scraped-clean rooms covered in mad aspirational scribblings - “Bookshelves here,” “We’d love it if people donated plays for the library here…,” “Fill,” “Widen?” - and fanciful sketches of an odd country club future with wood-burning stoves and grandfather clocks that are (for the present) merely outlines on the wall.

“The bar is made of cardboard,” says D, and it is - of piles of small, cardboard boxes, precariously placed.  Every part of the half-finished space begs for your input - starting with the staff, who ask for suggestions, however “silly,” about the new building (so much vaster than their old theatre, around the corner and above the pub).  Just write us a post-it note, they say, and that’s when we begin to notice that little yellow suggestions line the walls (“Love the cardboard bar,” one exclaims, “but how do you keep it DRY?”).  Some couldn’t wait for the post-it pad to come round, and wrote directly on the walls, child-like wickedness fusing with the helpful impulse.

The sills of the lobby are lined with playtexts, casually stacked, from the history of the old pub theatre.  It makes my fingers itch.

The evening promises us three short plays featuring three different theatre arrangements (in-the-round, thrust, end-on).  To allow for this experiment, the crew valiantly shifted the seating and staging drastically during long intermissions, and we were urged to spend the time exploring the upper floors and backstage spaces of this old library in the process of becoming a theatre. Every nook is filled with exercises in crowd-sourcing: Should the Bush do a musical? (Yes, the world needs more small, avant-garde musicals.) Where do you come from? (Los Angeles, Nova Scotia) What is the theatre? (A seeing place, a dancing space) What style of seats do you like best? (Green plush benches!) Most people took the opportunity to leave post-its asking for "Working toilets, please!" or "(Organic) cider at the bar," but D left a note filled with microscopic instructions for setting up the most versatile lighting grid.

All in all, a fascinating piece of environmental-theatre-meets-community-crowdsourcing.  But the intermissions weren’t, strictly speaking, the main theatrical event.  Several of the plays themselves were, unfortunately, more half-formed than the theatre itself.  Perhaps they were overburdened by ambition and constraints.  The playwrights started with a long line of props donated by the National Theatre, ever-so-easily explained items like a giant strawberry and a necklace of fingers, props that had to be integrated over the course of the short script.  Then they had to grapple with a series of mandatory stage directions by the likes of Michael Grandage and Alan Ayckbourn that would form the spine of the play. These were paraded before us with Brechtian glee before the start of each piece. Ayckbourn’s stretched for three pages - so long that they were obliged (with a wink) to give them to us as a programme-handout rather than reading them aloud, as was their wont.   Ideally, constraints like these force authors to feats of bravura ingenuity; here the constraints never became organic structures of the plays, giving them instead the jerky awkwardness of a marionette.

It's how new playwrights are made.

The first two plays opted for farcical comedy as a way of explaining away these mechanical shifts of prop-driven plot. But if you’re going to play something this broadly, you need to make it sharp as hell, and this is a feat that only Nina Sosanya manages completely among the quite skilled group of actors.  The last play of the evening, Jack Thorne’s “Red Car, Blue Car,” opts for a wholly different tone - a surreal juxtaposition of two narratives traveling in different directions to the same, chilling narrative point. I’m reminded of that famously palindromic Michel Gondry video in which a split screen shows backward motion on one side and forward motion on the other, until the characters meet in the middle and switch directions.  The somber tone of Thorne’s play absorbs the oddity of props and stage directions better (his last one, provided by Josie Rourke, is “She does something no one has ever done before.  She does it again.”), because it takes them less literally.

So the plays, despite the whimsy of their beginnings and the strength of their casts (Francesca Annis, I adore thee), are not in general of the quality I generally associate with the old Bush.  But that’s not really the draw or the delight of this evening out.  The space, the space’s the thing….

Symbolic first box of belongings (including the phrenological head named Phineas) brought to Farfara.

 
We arrived in London yesterday, bleary and Boston-soaked.  I'd been in the Bruins' city for the past two weeks attending a seminar in theatre and performance research, which was, needless to say, rollicking good fun. The days were long and filled with dense theoretical readings and fairly enthralling lectures, and sometimes I came home to a mound of homework (terrible shock that being a professor doesn't exempt me from homework) complaining that Theodore Adorno made my brain leak out my ear.  My hostess (childhood best friend turned oncologist) would reply, "Today my patient's brain herniated down his spinal column," and I would think, "Alright, if it's going to be a competition...." 

Sunset at Farfara

Hyperbole damns me again.

Don't revoke my access to my new Canadian homeland, but I have to admit that I didn't watch any Stanley Cup hockey during the whole of my two weeks in Boston.  This fills me with shame not just because Bostonians are the ancient Maritime brethren of Haligonians, but also because one of the Bruins' star players hails from Tantallon, just down the road from our new house.

Oh, that's right.  Did I neglect to mention that since last I've written on Sycorax Pine, we've become home-owners?  Proud possessors of 12 acres of ocean-view forest we've decided to call Farfara.  Closing and moving and dealing with the thousand shocks owned homes are prey to account for my unusual blog silence of late.  And now we've left Farfara in the most beautiful time of the Nova Scotian year, ne'er to return (until late August).  It feels me with melancholy, and not a little sense of house-betrayal.

At any rate.  Two days ago we made our sad, exhausted way towards London.  Who needs a taxi?, D said when we landed.  What an egregious expense! We've got a mortgage now - it's time to spend more wisely. 

We spent the next couple of hours wending our feeble way towards the London flat on a public transit system that seemed determined to go *absolutely anywhere* but that part of the city, while I struggled mightily not to crow with vindicated smugness. 

So we're here now, and you can expect (I say cockily) a veritable flood of blogging about this year's London adventures.  I'm determined this year: what doesn't get blogged gets lost in the mists of memory, never to be of use to my theatre research.  See?  Blogging = time spent working.  That's the ticket. 

But not right now.  We've come back from a night at the new Bush Theatre, and I'm exhausted.  Tomorrow.  Yes: tomorrow.

On the wall of a tube station:

A quiet complaint:


So shy.

It's Election Day here in Britain. And quite the fascinating election it has proved to be.  The nation's first televised debates.  The Lib Dems mount a spirited (and serious!) third-party challenge to Labour and the Tories for the first time in decades.  Their leader, Nick Clegg, says that his favorite author is Samuel Beckett, winning from me affection and a vague sense of unease.  (How could you not respect the intellectual complexity of that choice?  How could you not be troubled by the idea of a leader who is inspired by these lines from Worstward Ho!: "Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter. Try again. Fail again.  Fail better"?  Or maybe that statement is the essence of realistic liberalism. I say this as a progressive, you understand.)

Watching the election coverage the other night, D and I are struck by a candidate running under the aegis of the "Official Monster Raving Loony Party."  It had to be investigated.  And indeed, investigation only deepens the party's allure.

Then, yesterday, overheard in the Reform Club:

"Might go into the wee hours tomorrow."
"Yes."
[Pause.]
"I'm voting Monster Raving Loony, you know."
"Ha ha! Well, that's quite a surprise!"
"Well, its just another way of saying 'none of the above.'  Besides, our candidate is rather sensible.  He was a prison governor; now he coaches the British Rifle team."
"Ah well, that's all right then."

London has been taken over by the circus.

Not the parading-elephants and lions-leaping-through-flaming-hoops kind of circus that increasingly raise twinges in the ethical parts of our brains.  No, these are acrobats-and-clowns type circuses, and more than that, they are performance-art circuses, pushing the boundaries of the genre until it bleeds into dance, installation art, and abstract theatre.

The Roundhouse Theatre is at the centre of the current flurry of activity with their CircusFest, which brings avant-garde circus companies from all over the world to London.  The British Film Institute has even gotten in on the game with a film festival of circus films (La Strada, Dumbo, Wings of Desire) in its South Bank cinema. So, after an afternoon at the Reform Club on our first day in London, we loped off to the Roundhouse to see French acrobatic company Compagnie XY and their current show, Le Grand C.

My line of reasoning went like this: how better to keep ourselves awake through this first, brutal evening of jet-lag than to toddle off to something as rollicking as the circus.  Time-ravaged, we lay down for a brief nap and almost managed to sleep through the performance.  I jolted awake a mere 45 minutes before it began (after forming the best-laid plans to leave at least half an hour earlier).  D cast a sideways glare at me as we loped listlessly off to Chalk Garden for the evening.  Hey, I thought, it's not like the time I dragged him off to a day in New York that consisted entirely of a Beckett matinee and an Ionesco evening.

I hadn't considered the possibility of a minimalist circus.

You see, Le Grand C starts extremely simply and slowly.  A few human bodies, plainly clothed and varied in form, a few basic actions.  Everyone stands, in crepuscular light.*  Eventually, they bring on a log, and place it on its end.   Each member of the ensemble takes a slow, deliberate turn standing on the log.  The last to try is the stockiest cast-member - the strongman - who struggles mightily and sweatily with the small surface he must balance upon.

We wonder why we are here.

But the point, I think, is to get us to look at these movements in detail, to understand the basic vocabulary of acrobatics and respect the effort and control that goes into even the simplest of actions.  The company was undoing the conditioning that allows us to operate the incredibly complex mechanism of the body without being paralyzed by a perpetual sense of wonder.  Consider how it feels to receive a minor injury that interferes with something as everyday as the functioning of your hand, the motions of chewing, or the ease of your gait.   Suddenly the coordination of all those muscles and joints and nerve impressions seems impossibly cacophonic.  As every yoga devotee knows, merely balancing on one leg for any period of time requires astonishing control.  We forget the complexity of the body, just like we disregard the workings of the airplanes we fly in or the computers that connect us.  We just know that they work, and the miracle fades.

This miracle is what Compagnie XY reasserts for us in the glacial opening minutes of Le Grand C.  Unlike many acrobats, they try not to make their actions look effortless, but to make them seem hard.  Grueling, in fact.

This is not to say that these movements lack grace.  In fact, by simplifying the movements and allowing us to see the mechanics of each gesture, Compagnie XY hits on a performance genre that is cross between the lines and lifts of contemporary dance, the feats of gymnastics and acrobatics, and (in one very odd section) the battling scrum of a rugby match.  (I had to wonder how this sort of a form would be received in a country with a widespread cheerleading culture.  I kept hearing Sue Sylvester in my head, screaming, "Terrible, babies, terrible!  You think this is hard?  I'm passing a gallstone as we speak! That's hard!".)

From this minimalist foundation, XY builds a structure of human bodies - leaping, balancing, flying, falling bodies.  The tricks that follow are almost entirely accomplished with the actors' own forms, aided by only the simplest of props: the log, a basic see-saw, a long belt of fabric.  Human pyramids and towers go up, and then acrobats leap and flip from the top of one to the apex of another.  Cannons are made out of groups of dancers who fling their colleagues' bodies headlong across the stage and into waiting arms.  Dancers dive and fall and curl around each other's shoulders, stomach, legs - clinging and catching and courting disaster. 

As the movements build in complexity, this much becomes clear: acrobatic circuses, at their core, are about the mechanics of bodiliness (as shown by the opening) and the workings of trust.  Thus they are works (for performers and audience) about affection, community, connection.  They reassure us about the bonds that hold human bodies together in labyrinthine structures of support.  It fills you with a warm feeling; you wish you belonged to a community like this one. There is a lot of eye contact here, before every move, and many smiles after each achievement.

And this is not to say that there are no failures, because there are a few.  These slight unbalances, collapses, imprecisions, and drops are followed by even more affection - touches, glances, smiles to reassure everyone that all is well, both bodily and socially.

Is the "C" in Le Grand C "cirque," "communauté," or "coeur"? As the piece goes on, it reveals itself as a bit of a meditation on love.  The bulk of it takes place in silence, broken from time to time by instrumental interludes.  Every so often, you hear a grunted call of "Un!", to ensure (I am guessing) that the whole group's count is synchronized.

About three quarters of the way through the piece, the ensemble begins a round, a rather elaborate piece of musical wordplay on the twin subjects of love and being taken along (aimer, amant, amener, emmener).  Individual voices weave in and out of the whole, much as the acrobatic tricks are layered so that to look at one you are always looking away from another, and brilliant, defiant things are always happening just at the periphery of your vision.

The round dwindles to a single voice, a single man - the most charismatic of the group, another strong-man who looks rather like a bearded, burly Celtic hero and who grins like the sun.  He sings sustainedly, alone, as person after person climbs up his body and onto his shoulders.  His voice only begins to falter when the human tower he supports is four people high.

After eighty minutes of wordlessness, in the last minutes of the play we finally get speech.  Two men direct their colleagues in a trick (urging the audience to silence, nudging the acrobats verbally - a bit forward... one arm... now a knee...).  At first I thought this was because these were particularly perilous tricks, but they looked to be roughly the same as feats performed earlier in total silence.  I could only conclude that this breaking into or layering on of language was important at this late stage in the play.  Verbal communication as the last binding of community.  Of love. 




*I always find myself hyper-aware of lighting effects when I go to the theatre with D, who was a lighting designer when we met as students.  He spends most performances staring up at the lighting grid, picking apart how the stage pictures are made.  The first thing he noticed about the Roundhouse was the functional beauty of its theatrical space.  It was originally intended for the rail service - a roundhouse is a circular building at the end of a line where trains are rotated so that they can make the return trip.  It has all the height (I might have said "grandeur") to make theatre-in-the-round work.  Shorter buildings create awkward angles for a lighting designer: light the stage, and you end up blinding the audience opposite.

I am joining my grandfather's club. 

Some clarification is probably needed here: my grandfather has been a member of one of the historic London clubs along Pall Mall for the last half-century.  It is one of those institutions designed to provide a bastion of dignified masculinity where nineteenth-century husbands could seek their solace during daylight hours from the pervasive femininity of the domestic sphere. It has a vast library, an excellent dining room (Thackeray, who was a member, talks about the quality of the chef - who was much in demand - in Vanity Fair), a stunning colonnaded atrium, and a vibrant intellectual life.   This etching shows the upper level of the atrium in the 1840s.  What are all those women doing there?  I really couldn't say.  Probably being saucy. 

The club was founded by the supporters of the 1832 Reform Act, who felt the need of a social space for the progressive political life of London.  When my grandfather joined in 1959, they asked him to swear his commitment to the cause of reform.  "That sounds like something I agree with," he said, "but can you tell me what exactly it means?" "It means," the chairman replied, "that you believe that the middle class should have the vote."

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the political Liberalism of the club made it a gathering place for the prominent writers of the day.  Arthur Conan Doyle was a member, as were H.G. Wells, Henry James and E. M. Forster.   Siegfried Sassoon, beloved to me not only for his own poetry, but for his central role in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, was a member for even longer than my grandfather.  The actor Henry Irving was (perplexingly) a member of the Reform Club, not the actor's club nearby, the Garrick, which still doesn't admit women.  (And let's not forget that Stuart, the hero of Sherry Thomas's Delicious, is a fictional member of the Reform Club.)  Gladstone belonged, as well both Churchill and Lloyd George, although the latter two resigned their memberships when a friend was blackballed.

You see, when you apply for membership, your nominators present you to the Secretary and the Chair of the club, who then enter your name in a vast book that stand in the atrium.  The other members may then sign their names in support of your application or place a black mark under your name, blackballing you.  When Andrew Carnegie applied, so the story I heard goes, the labor practices of the American industrialist were not deemed to be in keeping with the principles of reform.  He was blackballed.  But when the Chair was giving me a tour of the club, Carnegie's picture hung on the wall of a back hallway, with other notable members.  "I heard that he was blackballed," I remarked with some surprise and not a little gaucherie. "He might have been," the chair replied, "People keep trying, you know."

The Reform Club was among the first (or the first?) of the Pall Mall clubs to admit women, which it has been doing quite heartily since the early 80s.  But it only occured to us last year that perhaps I might also join.  So on my first full day in London, I got dressed up and hied myself over to the club, to present myself to the Chair and obtain my official introduction to the Club. 

I have been visiting Pall Mall with my grandfather for several decades now.  When I was little, he used to take me to the clock in the atrium, which is set daily to the naval clock in Greenwich.   There is a book, he used to tell wee Sycorax, called Around the World in Eighty Days.  In this book, the hero makes a bet with some colleagues at the club, a bet that he can't make it all the way 'round the world and back to the club in eighty days or fewer.  The time will be marked by this very clock.  Let's set our watches to it, he would say, just like they would have.

My meeting with the chair was wonderful and surreal.  He introduced me to several different members, who expressed their exuberant willingness to sign by my name in the book.  The next thing I knew I was having lunch with the chair and an arms-dealer-turned-Anglican-canon.  When, I wondered, did my life become a John le Carré novel?

As I stood by the clock this time, I thought of my grandfather back in Washington, and of Jules Verne.  I went home and plucked our copy of Around the World in Eighty Days from the shelf.  I had never read it. 

The club insinuates itself into the opening lines of the novel:

In the year 1872, No. 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1816, was occupied by Phileas Fogg, Esq.  Of the members of the Reform Club in London few, if any, were more peculiar or more specially noticed than Phileas Fodd, although he seemed to make a point of doing nothing that could draw attention.

And then it dominates the pages that immediately follow:

Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform Club, he was nothing else.  That such a mysterious person should have been numbered among this honourable company might cause astonishment; let me say, then, that he was admitted on the recommendation of Messrs. Baring Brothers, on whom he was at liberty to draw to an extent unlimited. [...] He lunched and dined at the Club at absolutely regular hours, in the same room, at the same table; he never treated his fellow-members, never invited a stranger.  He never availed himself of those comfortable bedrooms that the Reform Club places at the disposal of its members [...] If he took walking exercise, he invariably did so with measured step on the inlaid floor of the front hall, or in the circular gallery under a dome of blue glass supported by twenty Ionic pillars of red porphyry.  Whether he dined or lunched, it was the Club's kitchens, the Club's larder, pantry, fish-stores, and dairy that supplied his table with their savoury provisions; it was the Club's waiters, solemn-faced men in dress-coats, with molleton under the soles of their shoes, who served his food on special china, upon admirable Saxony napery; it was out of the Club's matchless glasses that he drank his sherry, his port, or his claret flavoured with cinnamon and capillair; and it was the ice of the Club, imported at great expense from the American lakes, that kept his beverages in a satisfactory state of coolness.

That last luxurious detail always strikes me as particularly giggle-inducing.  They were dragging chunks of ice from Lake Michigan to London to cool the Reform Club's gin-and-tonics?

The wonderful thing about reading this edition is this: my grandfather had jotted little notes all through the margins, although this verb hardly described the cool precision of his minute characters. 

"Not quite accurate," his marginalia declare the description of the club above. "?," he writes, near a use of the word "gumption." "Right!" he exclaims when Phileas Fogg looks out over the lush gardens from his seat in the dining room.  And "Never!" when he washes down his pudding with a cup of specially mixed Reform Club tea....

We are in London now.  We arrived a little over a week ago*, on the first day that planes were allowed through the Atlantic passage to northern Europe. When else, other than in the last month, could I have uttered the words "I will see you at XYZ, volcano permitting" not once, but multiple times?  Life offers some strange opportunities.



We were lucky to be able to travel when we did.  If they had waited a mere twenty-four hours more to open British airspace, we wouldn't have been able to rebook our tickets for weeks.  I tried to take an attitude of Zen flexibility to events which almost exemplify the term "act of God" (specifically Vulcan), but I admit to being quite nervous about the 24 or more nights of non-refundable theatre tickets I had already booked for this trip.

So I embarked on our fifteen hours of plane travel from Los Angeles** with an unprecedented degree of glee, and (despite having gotten only an anxious two hours of sleep the night before, thanks to a blasted grading deadline) settled in to watch as many movies as possible on the journey.

What did I see?

• I started with the delightfully meta experience of watching Up in the Air from the window seat of an airplane.  Eventually D began to tire of my poking him every time George Clooney looked out over the clouds from his (considerably cushier) seat, and then pointing to the identical view from my window.  I was like a toddler who first discovers the likeness between art and life: Look- a cat on the page, and a cat sitting next to me! Mimesis! (This picture actually exists of me as a toddler, in my first ever moment as a reader.  I am pointing with one hand - like a chubby, Oshkosh-clad medieval Christ-child - to the cat on the cardboard page of my picture book, and with the other to my childhood pet Tyke.) I know that George Clooney is a divisive figure.  My students (particularly my male students) speak with disgruntlement of the way he turns in the same chiseled, dimpled performance in every film.  I, by contrast, find his choice of projects remarkably canny and his performances nuanced, if not chameleonic. Frankly, I think he is the Cary Grant of our day, and this film moved me profoundly in a way that I cannot describe in any detail without spoiling its central generic trick.
• Next I watched Precious, which left me too abysmally traumatized to get any sleep on the remainder of the flight.  There were some highly effective performances here, but I didn't feel convinced by the coherence of the film as a whole.  The fantasy sequence struck me as a little creakily done - looking more like a television show that had been rushed through production than like a film of the caliber that I felt Precious could be.  And as excellent a character as Precious herself was, I didn't know what to do with the concatenation of extreme suffering that was her lot.  It began to seem a bit like narrative cruelty rather than meaningful representation of real social problems.  I don't know - I would like to hear other reviewers' thoughts on this question.  Does her suffering (and her responses to it) cohere into something both meaningful and unexpected?
• Thinking that far too many hours remained in my flight, and that my soul was aching from my encounter with Precious, I turned to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for solace.  I am beginning to think (after this film and my non-retch-inducing encounter a few weeks earlier with New Moon) that a certain type of film is actually improved by being seen on the small screen of a seat-back television.  It makes it impossible to take the pretensions of the film too seriously, but also provides a circumstance in which you are exceedingly grateful for a film that entertains and passes the time quickly and engrossingly.    At any rate, this proved to be one of my favorites of the Potter films so far: the kids' acting has improved immensely over the years, and I found their nascent romantic conflicts well rendered.  But (as I am sure every critic has already noted) they bungled the most important plot-line (the question of Snape's adolescence and current loyalties) badly by barely treating it at all.  Why, film-makers, why?  Alan Rickman is an impeccable and magnetic Snape, and this was the aspect of the books that consumed endless discussion between the penultimate and ultimate installments.  Why squander our opportunity to settle into a good, long exploration of the Snape character, even while exploring the parallel moral quandary that Draco finds himself in?  Boo.
• In the few minutes I had left, I watched a little medley of Oscar-nominated short films: the tremendously witty and profane Logorama, a quintessentially Gallic piece of quirk called French Roast, and a bleak reflection on alienation called Miracle Fish.  I am going to have to seek out the rest on Netflix when we get back to the States in a couple of months.

We made our way through the ash without incident, and dragged ourselves home from the bustle of Heathrow to our green and shady flat in Notting Hill.  Home.

And then we slept.  And slept and slept.




*I am running, I know, a bit behind on the "London journal" portion of my blogging, quite apart from the huge reviewing backlog.


** We had been in LA for D's last few days of filming and my friend JL's wedding in Malibu, which featured stunning views of the historic Adamson house in one direction and the long line of the beach in the other.  After a delicious dinner, we all Bollywood-danced the night away, instructed by some professionals who showed us the basic steps....

I happen to be the mayor. 

I levitate like a Buddha above the political fray.

-Boris Johnson, Mayor of London,

on why it wasn't "cheeky" to show up at a celebration of the opening of a tube line 

that his predecessor and political nemesis championed.

D turned to me this morning and said, "Here's a sentence you don't hear everyday: 'As we expect buildings neither to be hairy nor in motion, these qualities give it a certain charm.'"

As it turns out, he was reading a Guardian article on the British Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, a building which most closely resembles an extremely frightened hedgehog. (If this highly literal description has peaked your interest, click on the link to the article for a picture.) 

Despite the author's virulent skepticism of expositions in general ("All of these journalists are even grumpier than me.  They hate everything" - D.), which he expresses as a wish that "expos and world fairs would lie down and die," his description of the pavilion itself is unabashedly affectionate.  Let me leave you with this:

The hairy thing sits on an uneven plane something like crumpled paper, to symbolise, in the gushy rhetoric of expos, a just-unwrapped gift from Britain to China. [...]

A tour around the site takes visitors past a series of installations themed on the role of nature in British society, culminating in the interior of the hairy cube/dandelion/hedgehog.  Here the other ends of the wands form a glowing fuzz, and the end of each wand entraps rare seeds, 217,300 in all, from Kew Garden's Millennium Seed Bank project which aims to preserve the world's most endandered seeds.  Heatherwick [the pavilion's designer] calls this space the "seed cathedral" [...]