THE MISTAKE autumn tour 2023 ended on October 30^th down in Canterbury, since when I have been slowly coming back to earth, remembering what it means to get up and spend an ordinary day with no particular demands and ‘no particular place to go’…

But I can’t leave the memories of this tour behind without at least offering a few snapshots…

Week 1 we were in Dartington, land of cream teas and spiders… (see previous blog)  Week 2 saw us heading north to Chester, taking an hour to get out of ONE ROAD in south-west London, before a further 3 and a half hours drive to the venue.

At least a packed house awaits us – well, a packed church… 

…with church acoustics, no rake, and 4 or 5 rows of audience, those at the rear not having great sightlines.  I make a plea before we start:  ‘Those at the back, when you can’t see the action that takes place on the ground, like Riko lying on her tatami mat, just imagine you’re listening to a radio play for a few minutes – because the words themselves, many of them verbatim, are very powerful and evocative…’

There’s a great response to the play, a huge pile of feedback slips filled in afterwards, and a lovely buzzing atmosphere, the whole event having been set up by passionate enthusiasts – a joy to have performed there.

Next day: fish and chip lunch by the water’s edge in Caernarfon,  sunshine sparkling on a calm sea.  

Smallish audience for the play, but no problem with sightlines – it’s a ‘proper theatre’.  On to Aberystwyth – the sea only glimpsed in the distance from the Uni perched high above the town where we perform in the eccentric Round Studio, with its weird acoustic ‘dead spot’ right in the middle of the stage:  a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ where if you’re not careful your speech (if not yourself) will disappear.  Close-up audience, intense show. 

Afterwards, an hour’s drive along ‘Bible-black’ Welsh lanes to get to my friends’ place in mid-Wales.  They’ve kindly offered to put up myself, my co-performer Riko, and our stage manager Kelly, for two nights in their gorgeous large house with the River Wye running through the grounds.  Riko’s comment best sums up the experience:  ‘This is heaven. I never want to leave.’ 

But after a day and a half, leave we must, driving 6 hours or more, all the way across Wales and England, to deepest Lincolnshire and the Broadbent Theatre.  Riko and Kelly ask, ‘How can there be a theatre here?  We’re in the middle of nowhere!’ 

But there is a theatre, and an audience too – who buy drinks and snacks from the ‘pop-up’ bar right next to the stage, which is only closed up seconds before we start the play.  I stand in the wings, listening to people laughing, clinking glasses, crunching crisps, and think to myself, this is not going to work – a play about Hiroshima?  Here?  Now?  But work it does.  The audience quickly becomes hushed, responding energetically at the end.  One man says to us, ‘Hmm.  You’ve given me a lot of food for thought.  I may have to rethink my views on nuclear weapons.’

Week 3 sees us take an hour to get out of the same road in south-west London AGAIN, before a further 5 hours drive to Lancaster, including torrential downpours, when the fastest setting on the van’s windscreen wipers simply isn’t fast enough.

Teeth gritted, eventually we arrive.  Coffee and cake, a swift set up in the lovely community arts centre, the Gregson, with a small raised stage where Riko and I have to think quickly as to how we’ll negotiate various of our moves, scene changes and props.

But it’s another packed and appreciative house.  We grab a night’s sleep before heading back down south to Stratford-on-Avon and the Bearpit Theatre. 

Fifteen minutes into the play that night, the soundtrack gives up the ghost.  I wait a little.  Wait a little longer.  Then have to stop the show while the issue is resolved.  I chat to the audience, trying hard not to break the mood too much, Riko gets up from under the ladder onstage where she’d been lying when we stopped and stretches her legs, before the soundtrack thankfully returns to life, Riko gets back under the ladder and we continue.  There are at least two reviewers in, but the ten-minute hiatus doesn’t seem to bother them too much – they don’t even mention it.

Fetching the van for the get-out from a nearby carpark, I realise just when it’s too late that I’m exiting the wrong way through a ‘no exit’ sign.  A car park with cameras.  It’s late, it’s dark and I’m tired – but drat! I don’t want a fine. There’s nothing in the tightly-drawn-up budget for parking fines. 

Next morning we find ourselves in Wales again – Cardiff, to be precise, and the Sherman Theatre, where I am provided with my very own parking cone – fame at last.  Before long though, I have to make the tricky 100 yard reverse manoeuvre up a very narrow service road to unload the van.  Not a skill you’ll find listed on my CV.

A sold-out house – our first of the tour.  Including a large group of sixth-formers who have travelled all the way from Hereford Cathedral School.  Their teacher tells me the next day that they were buzzing with excitement about the play all the way back to Hereford.  Great.  But while they were buzzing, I was tearing my hair out trying to locate any kind of spot near my digs where I might be able to squeeze the van in.   A long, tiring but deeply satisfying day and evening ends with me cursing the number of cars parked in this part of Cardiff.  I need my host’s help to guide me into a spot just about large enough, a process that involves numerous attempts and 15 minutes of my life that I will never get back again.  Luckily, inside my host’s house there’s a warm welcome awaiting me and some delicious late-night nosh.

Next day, back into England and our first school visit – Sibford School and over 120 students in a large daylit school hall.  Not the ideal space for the play but we give it our best shot. 

Only time for a short Q and A afterwards but we are returning the following week for a workshop there.  Then onto the delightful Riverside Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames.  Kelly is a huge Julie Andrews fan and cannot believe she is in Walton-on-Thames, birthplace of JA, and that we are now sitting having lunch at the Anglers, one of JA’s fave pubs!  Many a photo is taken.

Sunday is not a day off this week – as we head down to Chichester and the Quaker Meeting House for an afternoon performance.  We’re taken to Carluccio’s for lunch first, it takes an age just to get hold of  menu and I wonder whether we’ll ever be served and get back in time for the performance.  We are then informed that the chef is off, and that there’s only one person in the kitchen.  Hmm. I’m not that keen on wolfing down a large bowl of pasta then going straight on to performing an 80 minute high octane 2-hander play, but that’s what happen’s today.

After a day off the tour rolls on to Bristol Tobacco Factory Theatre – a wonderful venue, and our largest house yet, not far shy of 200 people.  Someone in the bar afterwards asks me if I saw Ed Sheeran in the front row.  ‘What?’  I say, in disbelief.  ‘THE Ed Sheeran?’  ‘Well, it looked a lot like him.’  I read through the numerous feedback slips later on that night, but I can’t find one signed by Ed.

Sibford School workshop: 30 or so students troop in, dressed in sports kit, football gear etc, who have had their sports session delayed in order to come and listen to more insights on Hiroshima and be encouraged to ask questions about the play they saw last week.  I get the feeling their minds are elsewhere. 

North to Hull Truck and the Godber Studio, where we play to a fairly large house.  Then it’s back down south again to Cambridge and the nightmare of trying to park or unload in the city centre, where our small venue is located up a long passageway.  First, an hour for lunch – but the meters only take coins!  I curse at them – ‘Come on, Cambridge, join the 21^st century!’   I need to find five one-pound coins for an hour’s lunch.  Luckily an angel in disguise tells me she has change of a ten-pound note in her purse.  I love performing the play in Cambridge – all the references to science, nuclear physics, maths, equations, Einstein, Oppenheimer seem to resonate with a particular vibrancy in this seat of learning.  In the Q and A, one man, a professor, says how much he loved the play but asks, ‘Why are you doing it in such a small (60-seat) venue – it should be in London, on the West End stage even!’ he suggests.

The man next to him disagrees, however. ‘No, this venue’s the perfect size for the play.  Claustrophobic, intense, with nowhere for the audience to hide.’ We are here for two nights.  It’s the mid-point of the tour.  I’ve really been relishing performing this play on tour so far.  Little do I know that in five days time, I will be forced to perform quite a different play altogether – and not with Riko, but all on my own…  (to be continued)