Full Circle

The first proper tour I did was as an 11-year old, and I didn't really understand the mechanics of the company or the hierachy. I mean, I spent most of my time with my chaperone, who was a retired teacher from a girl’s private school so I wasn’t in the thick of it much but anyway, it bears reflection.

Most of my contact was with the stage management team – I hardly saw the other actors out of performance. No wonder - why on earth would want to spend their time with an annoying 11-year old? Anyway, I think I preferred the earthy, practical atmosphere of the green room and the SM’s. I now realise that the swarthy, magnetic, guitar-playing, earring-wearing CSM was almost certainly conducting an affair with the pretty, busty DSM whilst already seeing the Production Manager. You have to admire his organisational skills in keeping them apart in the heat of touring. And I had a massive crush on the ASM which I wasn’t that great at concealing, and which she must have managed with tact and sensitivity, because I don’t remember getting my heart broken.

The only actor I was close to was close to was Tim, who played the central character and also my father. Perhaps we had a natural affinity, but I suppose he made an extra effort because it was so important that we were close on stage, in particular in the sections when his character is on hunger strike and they bring his son to persuade him to eat. He used to make me cry every night in that scene and he often spent a few moments afterwards making sure all was OK. A lovely man and a quite brilliant actor.

And here I am 34 years later playing a Dad myself in powerful scenes with an onstage son. My boy Matt “Alan Strang” Pattimore fills my socks with talc and ties my jeans legs in knots when I’m out of the dressing room, and I change his Facebook updates to anti-Liverpool ones when he’s in the loo, but there’s a similar emotional charge to our onstage relationship.

Whether he has a crush on the ASM though, I couldn't possibly speculate.

Road Trip

If you're staying in Travelodges all week then you're technically homeless between 12 noon and 3pm which is the disparity between check-out and check-in. Me and the boys break our journey at Great Malvern and find a very traditional tearoom called the Bluebird - apart from satisfying our hunger pangs it also gives Stuart a chance to add another entry to his exhaustive UK tearoom guide.
We stand out a bit. We're men, for a start, and also we're under pensionable age. When the waitress takes our order there's so many options - there's seven jams to have with your scone, for God's sake - that each order takes forever. When the food arrives it's accompanied by a woman who is either struggling with some new teeth or an oversized tongue, but it's worth the wait. Even considering Stuart's hamless ham and coleslaw sandwich.

The Next New Things

I had a bit of an epiphany on our last show in Derby about a section at the end of my fourth scene. It's always a little bit surprising that the sense of a line or an inflection or even something as fundamental as a motivation can elude you for well over 100 performances but it sometimes does. You have to keep revisiting whether you're still on the right page, as it were, or you'll probably end up having the Eureka moment after you finish, God forbid. Anyway, something which has been making me vaguely uncomfortable for some while is in a better place and that makes me feel GOOD.

The thorny matter of keeping things fresh vexes us all, I suppose. I once saw Richard E Grant playing Algy in That Play in the West End and he confessed that it bored him silly to repeat the same thing every night - and it sort of showed, too. I haven't seen Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem" but after 1000 shows he's as fresh as a daisy, they say. Of course there are actors whose technique is to repeat the exact same performance, move for move and line for line, night after night and presumably the illusion of freshness is worked into what they do; but that seems too artificial to me. I've also seen people turn into automatons after a few weeks doing that; a good performance turning into an increasingly mannered one with ever more awkward moves and gestures as the other actors change but they don't. There's also a terrible danger that you'll stop listening to people - and a fellow actor's unexpected pause or pace change or mistake can have devastating effect if that happens.

I'm directing a show in the summer with a cast of students, and since most of them will never have done a full week before it'll be fascinating to see how they cope with doing a run of 25 shows without a break.  

Lovely People

The milk of human kindness hasn't gone sour in Derby. Jamie's digs turned out to be populated by cats and students when we arrived, meaning a panicked call to LCT HQ and a last minute scramble for something else. Mercifully our landlord, Martin, turned out of his rooms until the weekend and Jamie now has the use of a suite including a walk-in shower. Harrumph.
We've all has some problems with digs over the weeks. Malcolm seems to be the unluckiest, and bears it with a very Dysartian stoicism - and there are an astounding number of landlords who expect you to manage with very little. I had digs last year where the washing machine was situated on the other side of the wall behind my headboard, and with a newborn baby in the house it was programmed to go off at 3am. I found this out at 3am. In the same digs Anna was expected to mount a loft ladder in the dark and sleep in a cubbyhole in the roof. Bonkers.
Mercifully there are many, many exceptions. I've never even met some of them, like Mrs Brown in Cambridge and Mrs Blindel in Darlington, but their little notes saying "Help yourself from the fridge" and welcoming bottles of wine sort of stand out as beacons in the travelling firmament.

Stalking Horse

There's been some right odd happenings this week at the wonderful Belgrade Theatre. On Wednesday matinee there were disturbances in the auditorium resulting in shouts of "I'll smash your bloody face in!", closely followed by someone being ejected. A day later someone tried to invade the stage but was tackled by the FOH staff and removed, whereupon he said that he wanted to give one of the actors a present. He wouldn't be drawn on which actor and he refused to leave the present with FOH to be passed on.

And then Matt gets his stalker. Facebook really has taken all the tedious investigative part out of stalking - this fella just messaged with a fairly innocuous question, Matt replied and bingo! Half a dozen messages offering rides on the chap's horse asking questions about the meaning of ha-ha (as if it wasn't obvious enough from the show).

The worst that's ever happened to me was the hand-drawn picture that was sent to my agent, but that was rather charming if I'm honest. Anyway, I'm too old to get obsessional attention from people really, although perhaps I'll be the first person to get a silver stalker, you never know.  

The Boys

It's Stuart's birthday today. I expect birthdays are an odd thing when you're travelling (I wouldn't know - my birthday is always a few days after a tour finishes), not least because the only time when we're all together to mark the occasion is during the warm-up when it's not exactly logical to start eating cake. Logical or not, though, we do it anyway.
There's been an admirable restraint on the horse-related merchandise front lately. It was Jo's birthday a few weeks ago - a significant one between 39 and 41 - and not one pair of jodhpurs changed hands. I do think we're missing an opportunity here though, I mean Jameson whiskey is very nice and all that but there's a bottle of White Horse on the shelf just screaming to be bought.
Anyway, it occurs to me that I talk about these fellas a good deal but you can't put faces to them, so here's a picture of us resplendent in wife-beaters, auditioning for the new Yorkshire-based boy-band Vestlife.

from left - Malcolm, Jamie, Stuart, me and Matt. For shame.

There Was An Aul Fella From Oxford...

The road from Waterford is peppered with towns which are famous for one reason or another. Wexford and Cashel are where the cheeses come from; Tipperary is where the sweetest girl I know comes from; and Limerick is where the five-line poem comes from. Well, it may be.

 It’s definitely where Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes” came from. I haven’t read the book or seen the film, but Lameys House, where rooms in the McCourt family home have been recreated by Onah Heaton, gives a strong sense of the incredible poverty and hardship of 1930’s Limerick. The building used to be the school where young McCourt studied until he was 13 - the walls are covered in maps where Yugoslavia is still a country; a dunce’s table faces the corner of the room; and a thin, springy can lies ominously on the teacher’s desk . As I leave Onah gives me a fragment of the building as a souvenir and I muse that, apart from the work, seeing gems like this is what touring is all about.

And that respectable middle-aged ladies say “feck” and awful lot in Limerick.

Among The Heathen

The trouble starts during the first half - a noisy radio playing the Irish equivalent of Radio 1 somewhere in the vicinity but so loud as to be clearly and irritatingly audible on stage. Malcolm, who's dialogue is most affected, soldiers on though. After a while I sense that we're not all on stage any more and I realise Jamie has gone off into the wings, and for a moment I wonder if he's been stricken by a stomach bug and been sick.
As we leave the stage after Big Horse we find there's a mechanic in the lane behind the theatre working under a car with a deafening radio playing, and he's completely impervious to any persuasion from Jamie, Stuart, me or ultimately Kate to turn it down. It's extraordinary. He just stonewalls us. Various strategies occur to us to silence this infuriating noise, from releasing the car jack to appealing to his pocket, all of which we discard and instead perform the second act with the disturbance. Oddly, silence falls shortly before the stable scene so Matt and Helen aren't forced to disrobe to the strains of Coldplay. Perhaps he has some artistic feelings. Or maybe his dinner was getting cold.

Waterford

We’ve returned to Ireland for a week, which involves ferries, rented cars and an awful lots of miles. It’s very odd being back after some time in the UK, and there are parts of Waterford which look almost like the continent so the effect is doubly disorientating.

Jamie and I have been here before with Abigail’s Party, and although the Garter Lane Theatre has to be the most hidden-away and poorly signposted theatre on this tour, it attracts a very respectable audience indeed. And not only that but responsive and warm. In fact if there’s one word which describes Irish audiences (in my experience) it’s warm. I meet a man in the supermarket the next day and he greets me like an old friend, completely wrong-footing me, until I realise he saw the show and wants to talk about it. At length. This willingness to engage in the arts spontaneously and regardless of environment is not uncommon, and it's a wonderful thing. 

What Might Have Been?

Richmond, where last night’s anaesthetic wine came from, is a really beautiful market town and having nothing really to do except go to another Travelodge later today, we go for lunch. Instead of lunch, we find the most gorgeous and oldest surviving Georgian theatre in the UK. The entire building is less than 9m wide and the interior is largely untouched, including some original paintwork and restored mechanisms for raising footlights and operating trapdoors. Apparently “Equus” was slated to play here today and tomorrow at some stage, and we can only imagine how extraordinary it would have been to work in this incredibly intimate space. You can literally reach the back row with a whisper.

Saddle Sore

There’s a freshness about the show since we got back after the Easter break. Not that it was getting stale, you understand, but after eight weeks on the road including 5 weeks in Ireland without any time at home I think we were all in need of a little R&R.

The Travelodge is a staple of the one and two night touring week, and before next week’s jaunt to Ireland we’re in four of them. We arrive at Scotch Corner in the late evening and, without being cruel, a motorway Travelodge is best taken with a substantial slug of wine so Fiz and I get some in before we check in. The lady on reception mistakes our arriving together for a more intimate relationship, but it takes us a while to catch on. This happens quite often, and the trick is to put the situation straight whilst not suggesting that the mistake is a ridiculous one. It’s a complicated manoeuvre. What’s more bizarre is that the receptionist’s FIRST name is Dineen, so if she and I were romantically involved she’d be called Dineen Dineen. This is, if anything, rather less likely than Fiz and I getting hitched.

Big People's Shoes

In Bury you find the only functioning Regency theatre in the UK, and what a delight it is, too. It's just perfect. From the macroscopic:

...to the microscopic. Isn't the detail of this script just wonderful?

And there's a nice surprise for us on our dressing room door, too. Although the gentleman in question really requires a "Sir" appending next time someone's passing with a paintbrush.

Hang on a moment, though. Didn't someone else have a stab at this, too?

Good try. But not quite.

Home Town

Our first week back in the mainland is split between Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds, and over the years I've been to Cambridge a fair bit, both for work and for play. I came to the Trinity Ball here when my brother-in-law graduated (in law, as it happens) and I ate an oyster which made me so sick I ruined some picnickers dinner by vomiting on the lawns. Also, it is home to an American friend of mine who lectures here. 

One of the Great Eternal Truths of Theatre is that when you get to my age, friends will only see a show if do it for them in their living room. But then they've seen you in so much unutterable crud over the years that they can't be blamed for being a touch wary. Now this isn't quite my friend's living room, but it's definitely on her doorstep and I confess I'm pretty surprised that she is too busy to come. When your job is showing yourself off in public, I guess you take it personally if people don't want to see the exhibits. However, as younger and wiser friends point out, perhaps she feels the limited time she has is better spent talking to me rather than watching me...   

I've never taken anything to Oxford, my real home town, except when I was a bratty child actor working for the Oxford Playhouse Company. However, I did tour "Dealer's Choice" to the seaside resort where I spent every summer as a kid. The venue had only just been built and had excellent facilities, it was a perfect summer evening and publicity was well in hand. Having played some very small and remote halls, we were looking forward to a bit of a treat.

No-one came at all. I still shudder now when I visit.

Bodhran

The Dubliners have never had anyone on bodhran, but since I don't play anything which involves moving up and down a musical stave it's my folk instrument of choice. It's enjoying a bit of a musical renaissance at the moment; there's a young female rapper called MissElaneous who does a bit of bodhran-beating, and when we were in Dundrum the marketing manager told me about a young rapper/bodhranist called Jim McConnell that I finally tracked down. Sadly he died a couple of years ago, but this brilliant footage remains:



RIP MC Lunitic, as he is also known.

That's how you play the thing. Quite how this old fellow I saw in Dublin playing on Grafton Street gets away with his double-beater flat playing style is a mystery.

Dubliners

When I was growing up, folk music was a bit of a joke. I mean, it was the sort of stuff that inspired the Vic Reeves spoof, where bearded men stroll about in tight nylon rollnecks which showed their nipples. There was a  bit of it on telly - the Spinners and Steeleye Span and what not, but it was noteworthy mainly for being hugely inoffensive and safe family viewing. When you recall that this was the era when Jim Davidson was on telly it makes you blench.
Then I discovered the Dubliners, and not the later incarnations but the Original Dubliners line-up of 1966-1974. Just a look at the album cover suggests they're a bit dangerous:

That dodgy-looking geezer second from right is Ronnie Drew and the wild-looking dude in the middle is Luke Kelly, and they were the heart of the group and sang many of the great songs. Then l-r John Sheahan, Ciaran Bourke and Barney McKenna. Hard-drinking, heavy-smoking legends. Bourke suffered a brain haemhorrage on stage in 1974; Kelly collapsed on stage because of a brain tumour in 1980; Drew died in 2008 of throat cancer - perhaps a million cigarettes are why his voice sounded "like coke being crushed under a door". Sheahan and McKenna are in the band to this day. In later years they started to self-censor a bit - the rebel songs like "The Old Alarm Clock" and "Rising of the Moon" largely disappeared from their roster, and for supposed reasons of decency you'll never heard all seven verses of "Seven Drunken Nights" on their albums.
But it's the Original Dubliners you want - the classic quintet - before the politics got in the way.