The queue to get into the Prince Edward theatre is stretching right down the pavement and around the corner.
They shudder close together, everyone looking up suspiciously as the sky begins to drizzle down on them.
With a big sigh, I walk to the end.
Except, is this the end? I can't tell. There seems to be a great old gap going on.
"Sorry," I say to the first person after the jump. "Are you not in the queue?"
"Yeah... we are..." she says, sounding just as dozy as you might imagine someone would who hasn't quite grasped the concept of moving with the line.
With a side-eye of confusion, she shuffles forward, closing the gap. And I fall in behind her group.
The queue moves slowly. Painfully so.
I don't mind. Even though I'm standing in the rain with no room to put up an umbrella. Because there is a sniffer dog on duty tonight and he is so super cute my heart is melting along with my makeup.
"Please have your bags open and ready for inspection!" shouts out the queue controller.
The young woman ahead of me opens her bag, ready for inspection.
"Have you got any food?" asks the bag checker.
"Yes," she says, looking confused.
She probably still believes that bag checks are to protect our 'comfort and security' and not the theatre's bar sales. So sweet. So innocent.
"Sorry," says the bag checker. You can't bring in food or drink."
The dozy woman steps forward. "Can she leave it somewhere?"
The bag checker looks around. "Let me get a manager."
A manager is called. We all wait for his arrival.
"Sorry, you can't bring food in," says the manager, repeating the party line.
Honestly.
This wouldn't happen at the Shaw Theatre. They were putting people's food shops in the bar fridge for their audience members. You just can't get the service in the West End.
With the ladies now occupied with the manager, the bag checker moves on to me.
He reaches into my bag and grabs my water bottle, giving it a good squeeze. I'm not entirely sure what he was checking for there, but whatever the test was, my bottle passes.
"Got your tickets?" he asks.
"No, I'm collecting."
He points inside. "Just through there," he says and I am waved into a foyer that would very definitely feature as a puzzle room in some megalomaniac's house of death. Curved walls are punctuated by multiple exits that almost certainly lead to torture chambers, and we are crowded in, like sheep in a abattoir, all bleeting as we surge forward towards the bar or box office to be bled dry.
"Anyone collecting tickets, round that way," says the queue controller. Another one. It's all about controlling the queues at the Prince Edward.
I go round.
And round.
And round.
Until I find the end of the queue.
Halfway up a flight of stairs.
I balance on a step and try not to fall over every time someone squeezes past to get to their seats.
"Very disorganised," a bloke mutters as he elbows me.
"You guys collecting tickets?" asks another before looking with despair at the end of the queue, far behind us.
But we move fast enough, the queue controller directing people to the next free box officer.
"What's your surname?" asks my box officer, just as I'm trying to tell him.
I repeat it. "Smiles. S. M. I. L E. S."
He looks through the ticket box, but the Ss are gone.
He turns around. "S?" he says to one of the other box officers.
"I've got the Ss!"
He turns back to me. "Can you spell your surname again?"
I can. And do. Slowly.
"Maxime?"
Eh. Close enough.
"And what's the postcode?"
I tell him. He hands over the ticket.
It's well swish. It has the show artwork printed on it. I don't have time to admire it though, I already have someone trying very hard to walk through me.
I escape through the rope barriers and look around. I need the Grand Circle entrance.
Ah! There it is.
Through one of the doorways that surely has a tank of piranhas waiting underneath a trapdoor on the other side.
"Looking forward to the show?" asks the ticket checker as she tears off the stub.
"Yeah!" I lie.
I'm not really looking forward to the show. I'm here to see Mary Poppins, and, I've got to admit, I really don't like Mary Poppins. Never did. Not even as a kid. So much do I not like it, that the last time it was in the West End, I refused to take my nephew to go see it. I just... could not face it.
And here we are.
Turns out I'm more committed to my marathon than my nephew.
Sorry Alexander!
Eh, he's alright. Started uni this year. I'm sure he's totally over it now.
But no usher needs to know all that. Best to be enthusiastic. Or at least, pretend to be.
"You're in door M!" she says, handing my shorn ticket back. "M for Mary!"
Lucky me.
I manage to evade the piranha tank, and start climbing the stairs. I have to admit, it's rather nice in this stairwell. As theatre stairwells go. The carpet is red. So are the walls. The stain of victims past, I suppose. But with lots of art deco gold details to lift the mood.
"Door M is through the bar!" says an usher, posted in what could be a very confusing crossroads, as signs pointing in every direction attempt to direct us to the correct doors.
Sure enough, I find myself in a bar. There's a glass cabinet filled with show merch. Rather upmarket show merch. The mugs are tall, the blankets fleecy, and the umbrellas have parrot heads on the handle.
Just like Mary's.
I'm almost tempted by one of them.
And the Bert Bear. Complete with chimney-sweeping broom. He's a cutie.
I have to remind myself that I don't actually like this musical.
I back away, keeping my debit card firmly in my bag as I head for door M.
The auditorium is red. Very red. I've seen a few red theatres on my travels, but mostly of the dingy sort. Ones where the walls are bumpy from years of polyfilla repairs. This is an entirely different sort of red. A glossy red. An expensive red.
I'm staring at it so much, I almost bump into the usher.
"Can I get a programme?" I ask automatically, unsure if she's even selling programmes.
Thankfully, she is.
"Of course you can!" she says. "Programmes are four fifty."
I stand aside to let her deal with the next person as I find the cash.
She pulls a programme from her satchel, and hands me the fifty pee of change.
"Err, D10?" I ask.
She leans in to peer at my ticket.
"You're down the stairs on the fourth row," she says, gesturing with her hands. "On the right."
Down the indicated stairs I go, to the fourth row, and find my seat, as promised, on the right. On the aisle as it happens. Well done me.
Coat safely stowed under seat, I twist around to get a good look at this place. It's a lot bigger than I'd imagined. I'd always thought of the Prince Edward as one of those diddy West End venues. Like the Phoenix. But it's bloody massive. The circle is broken up by a warren of split levels and aisles and brass railings. It's a good thing I asked for directions. I was have definitely got myself trapped somewhere if I hadn't, and my wails of anguish would have echoed around this beast of a space until a kindly usher took pity of me and put me out of my misery.
The seats fill up around me.
There are a lot of kids, but not as many as you might think. This isn't a Matilda audience. Lots of young women appear to have dragged along their equally young beaus, and are providing us all with a sneak preview as they do their best to sing the hits from the movie.
A couple of Americans are sitting behind me. They haven't joined in the sing-a-long. They're too busy munching their way through a Milky Way.
"It doesn't have carmel?" one of them exclaims.
“No. They don't over here."
That revelation stuns him into silence for a solid minute before they move onto their weekend plans.
The lights dim.
Whoops go out all over the theatre.
Childlike voices comes over the soundsystem. It's Jane, and Michael, Banks. They have something very important to tell us. And that is that Mary is here, and she has rules. We're to switch off our phones, and unwrap our sweets. Spit spot.
Mary sounds like a right bitch if you ask me.
The curtain rises and I grit my teeth as the children dash about being charmingly nauseating.
And then Mary appears, and is brusk and efficient and magical, I guess.
I mean... even my cold dead heart has to admire the stagecraft. Every minute is packed with a prop whizzing about or appearing suddenly, or disappearing, or turning into something else.
The tech team must be having constant kittens trying to get it to all work on cue.
I'm not the only one who's impressed.
A woman sitting down the front of the circle and she's got her phone out.
She's being pretty sneaky about it, she's turned the screen light right down, and she's holding it low, down close to her lap. She takes a photo. First portrait. Then landscape. Then at an artistically tilted angle.
I think she's done, but nope. She taps around on her screen, brings up Whatsapp, attaches the image to a chat, and then starts typing up a message.
I can't see what she wrote from all the way back here, but I'm willing to put money on it being a rave review of how much she's enjoying herself.
That done, the puts down the phone. But only for a moment, because down on stage the set has just changed and our lady needs to get herself another set of photos to remember it all by. Portrait. Landscape. Titled. Whatsapp. Done.
Interval.
Thank gawd. I don't think I could have handled a second more of those chirpy chimney sweeps.
"Chim chimney chim chimney..." sings a woman as she trots up the stairs to go to the bar.
"Chim chimney, chim chimney, chim chim cheroo..." sings one of the Americans sitting behind me.
"Chim chim cheroo..." whispers the small girl sitting next to me as she digs into her ice cream.
I now know why the walls are red.
This is my hell.
All the audience are all demons sent to torture me, to the tune of this gawd-awful musical.
There's nothing for it, but to surrender to my fate, letting this irritatingly cheerful tunes swarm around me.
Up ahead, the Whatsapp Woman gets her phone out again, but an interval has passed since last she tried and and someone must have complained to the front of house team because the usher is ready and waiting.
She runs down the aisle, and bringing out her torch flashes it right into the Whatsapp Woman's eyes.
Dazzled, the woman quickly puts away her phone.
Ha.
Sadly, the usher can't pull the torch flashing trick on the cast, and I'm forced to sit through this overly long show. How they can turn drag out this lack of narrative for nearly three hours would almost be impressive if it wasn't stuffed full of filler. I amuse myself by playing dramaturge and picking out all the bits I would cut. The vase? Smash that. The shop in the park? Close it down. The statue? Bury it,
I am rudely brought back by the cast encouraging us to clap along with their singing. Which is just mean. Everyone knows I have no rhythm.
I do my best, but my heart isn't in it.
And as soon as the house lights are up, I'm already out of my seat and pulling on my coat, unable even to wait for the orchestra to finish up.
Let's just hope I don't fall in that piranha tank on the way out. This is not the theatre I want to be haunting in the afterlife.