Ian McKellen stars as the coward-knight Falstaff.
When I was in London recently, walking down near Cheapside, north of the Thames, I went into the small museum built above the Mithraeum, an ancient site hidden twenty feet under Bloomberg’s glassy European headquarters. You’re often conscious in London of the place’s great age, but there’s nothing like visiting the remnants of a third-century temple devoted to Mithras—a bull-killing god popular with Roman centurions—to make you appreciate just how many cities lie beneath the streets. (A river, the Walbrook, once ran by the temple, though it has since been built over and lost.) Spring in London feels like a time for the new: goslings waddle in the parks, tiny daisies dot the grass. This May, however, many theatre productions were digging old, sometimes familiar things out of the sediment and reconsidering them in the city’s changing light.
This story is from the June 03, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the June 03, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
