In
(Verona, Canterbury)
Having teched at Wispers girls’ school in Surrey and previewed in the glorious, warm space that is the Globe, we now begin a tour of Romeo & Juliet that takes us whirling around the UK and skimming across
Europe. The biggest question is if we’ll ever actually make it home again, for there are many perils on the quest to bring Shakespeare to the dark corners of the Continent. This is a log charting our, ahem, missionary efforts.
It’s the first of our tour dates in
Canterbury. The scene is beautifully set — a barrow facing the ruins of
St Augustine’s Abbey. The sunlight trickles from the sky and a gaggle of young lads screaming over a football appear to be tiring. I emerge from the audience playing the ukulele and realise to my horror that in all the hurly burly of coming to the country from
London I’ve neglected to check that my ukulele is still tuned. This is in keeping with the show — earlier in the play, I direct a line about avenging honour to a burly skinhead. He’ll understand, I think, in my infinite depth. He does not understand. At the end of the speech his girlfriend nudges him and says, quite loudly: ‘He was talking to you’ At which he grunts.
Canterbury is a slow battle of a town. The beautiful Tudor houses try desperately to shake off the parasitic food-chains nestling beneath them. The proliferation of Chaucer, though not as bunny-boiler as
Stratford for Shagspar, is fairly intimidating. They even have a Chaucer Driving School. Because the main thing we remember of
Britain’s first poet is that he was a really careful driver. The supermarket is an anomaly. I’d never walked into a completely silent supermarket before, and it gives the entire cast the heebie-jeebies. Does this mean the more well-known supermarkets fill their aisles with white noise, subliminally encouraging us to buy vegetarian party bites we’ll never eat? Time and science will tell. The one member of staff perhaps explains the ironic conundrum of beggars outside the Jobcentre.
We go for dinner post-show and I realise why actors can be nightmares for your day-to-day professional. The lines become blurred offstage, and getting a reaction from people is addictive. It’s very hard not to tease a surly waiter after three hours of prodding and poking and provoking onstage.
Walking into a Cuban bar later we are asked if we’re with ‘the theatre’. Why yes, we are, we reply, and how considerate of them to guess that at midnight on a Thursday we’ll be in need of free mojitos. Except the party’s not for us. It’s for Cats the musical, which has come to town. We are briskly and humourlessly evacuated from the private party. That I am, in fact, the Prince of Cats appears not to influence their decision. Ah, rogues and vagabonds. Give me Shakespeare alfresco over a Lloyd-Webber spaying any day of the week. –>