(The Mistake tour 2023)

Dartington, a most beautiful place, with ancient trees, grade II listed gardens, set amidst green rolling Devonshire hills – what a place to start our tour of THE MISTAKE – three days rehearsing and then performing in such lovely countryside.

Of course, the countryside is full of other things too…insects, wasps, spiders…

Myself and our director Ros were staying a few miles away with good friends.  But my colleagues Riko and Kelly were staying in what used to be student accommodation, on site, with all of Dartington’s wonderful facilities on their doorstep.  And with huge shady trees and shrubs   towering over their dorm block.

Nothing is perfect, is it?  There’s a Buddhist word for this concept, I believe.  For example, you’re having a glorious summer’s picnic by a gently meandering river but a very persistent wasp will not leave you (or your cream tea) alone.

Thus Riko and Kelly’s first night was ruined by the many spiders they found lurking in their rooms, spiders which at times seemed to be practising for the sprint finals in the Arachnid Olympics.

So, an upgrade to some very swanky rooms was given to them for that first night with a promise that the rooms in the dorm block would be deep-cleaned and dusted.  But being in the countryside and with autumn coming on, you’re never going to get rid of spiders completely.

(1500 year-old yew at Dartington)

Michael Sells and his producing team at Dartington are incredibly supportive to us and we get to rehearse in the performance space for 2 days before we open – which is so helpful.  It’s a big space and the play has more room ‘to breathe’ than previously when we were in Edinburgh (in a tiny space on the first floor of the Hilton Hotel) and in London’s Arcola Theatre (where there was more space but not as much as here in Studio 1).

We spend the 2 days in very profitable rehearsals and lunching al fresco at the lovely Green Table café with all its locally sourced ingredients.  Friday the 8^th is the day of our ‘opening night’.

‘Any sign of spiders?’ I ask the others.

‘Yeah, there are still plenty, but we’ve just had to resign ourselves to it.’

Kelly then says that she read somewhere that we swallow around 500 spiders in a lifetime. 

What?! we chorus.  Where did you read that?

‘I can’t remember exactly.’

I say to her that I can’t recall ever having eaten or swallowed a spider either awake or in my sleep.

‘In your sleep?’ she asks.  ‘How would you know.?’

Hmm, she has a point.

The grounds here are so beautiful and in the grade II listed gardens are many stunning trees including the fabled ‘Twelve Apostles’ – 12 ancient yew trees.  I can’t wait to see them – but when I get there I’m greeted by what look like twelve tree stumps.  They’ve all been given a serious hair-cut (or whatever the correct horticultural term is…pollarded?), the subject of much debate amongst some of the locals we talk to.  Nothing is perfect.

But Friday 8^th sees Riko Nakazono give her first public performance in THE MISTAKE and she rises to the occasion magnificently.  A good-sized audience is gripped throughout and a number of them stay for our Q and A.  One elderly gent starts to weep as he tells everyone of his visit to Hiroshima and its Peace Museum a few years back – how profoundly it had affected him, and how tonight the play had brought all those memories back. 

The utter inhumanity of those ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

A Japanese lady dressed in traditional Japanese clothing is in the audience and hands us each of my team a small ‘good luck’ card – two faces can be seen in it – the female clears away all obstacles, the lady tells us, and the male rakes in good fortune.  She hopes this will happen for us on the tour.  I do too.  Obstacles surmounted, and good fortune greeting us.

On the journey back to London, I ask Kelly again about the spiders and ask her to look it up on Google.

‘Ah, here it is – it says that we swallow about 8 spiders a year.’

Oh, well, when put like that it sounds more credible.

Then I ask her to read out the whole thing.

‘There is a myth that says-’

MYTH!  Stop right there!  A myth.  Exactly!

I hereby declare to all and sundry that I have never (knowingly) eaten a spider in all of my 6 decades to date.

‘Doesn’t mean that it won’t happen on this tour though,’ Kelly mutters, under her breath. 

The tour is now underway – with our next stop being Chester, then Caernarfon, Aberystwyth and Lincolnshire…

May we have good fortune, few obstacles and not too many spidery encounters…

(THE MISTAKE tour 2023)

So I’m strolling over Waterloo Bridge, it’s not quite sunset yet, this is back in early May, strolling with my great friend Marcia, hugely talented director, playwright and sometime actor.  She lives in Canada, has dual nationality, her mother still lives in London and Marcia is back to visit her.  ‘How is the tour shaping up?’ she asks me.  ‘Oh, it’s all coming together well, my only headache is that I’m having trouble finding a stage manager.’  Marcia thinks for a moment, asks me what the tour dates are, then says, ‘I may have the perfect person for you.’  ‘What, you know some UK stage managers?’  ‘No, this one is Canadian.’  ‘Well, how’s that going to work?’ I ask. ‘She’s coming to the UK on a 2-year visa in just a few weeks and will be looking for theatre work.  She also wants to explore the country – so your tour could be ideal.’ 

‘Can she drive,’ I ask? 

‘Yes.’

But on the wrong side of the road, I think to myself. 

I later learn that Kelly, for that is her name, can also only drive automatic.  That’s the favoured choice in north America.  So I will need to source and hire an automatic van – not so easy to come by. 

But I do, and Kelly arrives in the UK, and is absolutely up for the job, stage managing on the tour of THE MISTAKE, knowing that into the bargain she will get to see York, Chester, Canterbury, Brighton, Chichester, Stratford-on-Avon and a host of other places, even if only fleetingly.  Then WHAM!  She contracts Covid in the second week of rehearsals – having avoided it all through the pandemic in Canada – and has to take the best part of two weeks off, meaning I have to fall back into temporary stage management duties, as well as acting, writing, organising, hiring vans, you name it…

But rehearsals continue apace – in the splendid Sands Films Studios, Rotherhithe – and Kelly eventually returns to us, and meanwhile Riko Nakazono, my new-co-performer, has been getting her hugely challenging role under her belt, thanks to the expert guidance of our director Rosamunde Hutt, and with extra voice coaching from the brilliant Kate Godfrey, and before we know it, it’s Tuesday September 5^th…

Did you hear the one about the Canadian, the Japanese and the half-Italian, who set off round England and Wales for two months to perform a play about Hiroshima and the first atomic bomb?

No?  Well, it’s not a joke, it’s a reality…and first stop is Dartington in Devon, where THE MISTAKE tour opens on Friday Sept. 8^th… Watch this space for more news over the next few weeks…and I very much hope that news won’t include being pulled over by police for driving on the wrong side of the road… 

Photo of Riko Nakazono by SIMON RICHARDSON