by Stephen Collins '74 • photos by Brian Speer

Martin Andrucki, a Bates College professor of art, was talking

about Oliver Cromwell and the repression of theater in England

during the Reformation when he pointed over the heads of a dozen

Colby, Bowdoin and Bates students, past a double-decker bus that

was careening through London's Bloomsbury Square, and down

toward The Strand a few blocks away. "There's a place called

The Temple Bar. Have you seen it?" he asked. "That's the boundary

between the City of London and Westminster." It marks the line

between the city, where theater and dancing were forbidden in the

1640s, and the West End–Westminster, Kensington, Mayfair and

Soho–where, 350 years after Cromwell scowled at their sacrilegious

play acting, theaters still thrive.

Welcome to the new CBB-London Center, part of an innovative

consortium for international study pioneered by Colby, Bates and

Bowdoin. Welcome to a portal through which Colby, Bates and

Bowdoin students enter a brave old world.

scroll right >>>>>

One challenge in establishing

the CBB center (above) has been

to strike a balance—to

offer the benefits of immersion

in a foreign culture

without sacrificing rigorous

academic standards.

Andrucki had the students' focused attention on a Monday morning in mid-February. On Tuesday, students in the center's Modern and Contemporary British Literature and Culture cluster would resume their study of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in a course titled Bloomsbury–Then and Now. A third cluster studying International Policy Issues would meet with Colby Professor of Government Kenneth Rodman, who was teaching European and American Relations.

For students in Andrucki's course, clearly the play is the thing. As they settled in around the table, talk of the previous weekend's activities was all about theater, never mind that during January and February they had seen Shakespeare, Beckett, an Italian classic and a couple of modern plays in weekly outings that are part of a Text and Performance class. "I waited two and a half hours and got some returned tickets for American Buffalo," one student told his classmates, recapping the highlights of his weekend like a soccer player describing a spectacular goal. "And then I saw [actor] William H. Mason in a restaurant afterwards."

"Hey. There's a new Mamet play," chimed in another student. "It's a limited run March 14 through April 6. Anybody interested?"

Andrucki, interviewed after the class, said, "I'm in theater; London is the place to be. It's totally different to sit in a class in Lewiston or Waterville and say, ‘What about Othello?' Here we saw the Royal Shakespeare Company do Othello last week."