(Verona, London)

You know when you’re a child and you do a great big poster-paint masterpiece of a samurai or a dinosaur and show it to your classmates and they say ‘woah, that’s wicked’ and then you show it to your teacher and she gives you a gold star and then you take it home to your dad and ask him if he wants to put it up on the refrigerator and he says ‘That rubbish? What an eyesore! Just put it up in the attic with your scout badges and ballet trophies’.

Well, that’s a bit like bringing a touring show back to London. You take it to the countrified masses, the kids’ eyes light up, and a gentle optimism coats the sugary goodness of the evening. In London, you become fast food. They’ve seen it before, they know the tricks, they just want to see if there’s any new particularly outrageous tricks to astound them. That is why I hate (and love) London audiences. High maintenance.

Our first performance is at Lincoln’s Inn for a collective of barristers (an eloquence of lawyers, chief-oracle Google informs me). The prospect of yet another aquatic performance in the midst of a city monsoon is bettered only by the prospect of enunciating over rainfall to an audience that spend each and every day talking their knackers off. They eat a barbecue in the rain and some go home and after the interval more desert and the rugged troopers that stay till the end are our most enthusiastic audience since the Globe. Sodden and sniffling and limping from wayward swords in a slippery fight, I look towards the barristers’ palatial workplace and think: ‘What have we done with our lives?’

And then I remember that I’m the luckiest man in the world.

The next day is Fulham Palace, and there is certainly one thing wrong with that description. Also, the colossal impact of budget flights hits home as I realise that a very noisy plane crosses Fulham airspace every three minutes. That, my friends, is a lot of carbon footsteps. We’re talking a very complicated waltz diagram of carbon footsteps here. As a result, we bellow. Farewell, colour and detail, I knew them, Horatio. Ironically, in the palace itself there is a masquerade ball attended by very well-spoken people. When I pass them at the interval they are eating foie gras and dancing to that classic 90’s ballad Rhythm Is A Dancer.

One of the tricks of alfresco performances is the unpredictability of the entrances. I mis-time an entrance for the first act finale and end up sprinting to get back to the stage (’Here comes the furious Tybalt back again! Boy, he’s really going for it…’). Point of reference that Stanislavki failed to mention: It is very difficult to run and be angry at the same time. Your face just contorts into a strange concoction of perturbed and out-of-shape.

Short but sweet, Londinium. You know I’ll be back. –>

(Verona, Salisbury)

It’s nine thirty at night and you’re hurtling through a former Benedictine abbey in a hulking great van with both its slide doors open and a person hanging from each exit. Why? Because you’re part of the A-Team. And ‘A’, as we all know, stands for Actor.

Here on the fourth leg of our tour we’re recklessly delusion-prone. We warm up in marble halls full of long-forgotten medals and golden keys, paintings of well-to-do folk lounging by the river and Fred Astaire’s shoes in a little box. Now that was a man with teeny tiny feet. Poor Ginger. The biggest accomplishment of Salisbury is the discovery that, contrary to centuries of scientific research, it is possible to perform Romeo & Juliet underwater. The first night occurs in haemorrhaging rain, and has a positive effect on pace (why rain would make wet actors act faster is a big fat mystery). It also lends a nice cinematic feel to the climactic knife-fight scene, in that both of us are thinking: ‘well, here’s the part where we get stabbed for real’. At half-time we ask the audience if they’d prefer to come back tomorrow. They make a resounding decision to stay. I am reminded that Wilton is a military town.

Speaking of the British Empire, we’re staying with a man known only as The Colonel. He’s very, very nice and intermittently terrifying. I feel like I should be saluting more than I tend to, and we all put on ‘proper voices’, like a first-date meeting the parents. Interesting fact: The Colonel keeps a box of matches on every toilet in the house. Why? To disperse those embarrassing post-business fumes of course! Silly civilians.

The local watering-hole is a bit like walking into an episode of Skins, and we kick the yoofs off the pool table and confiscate their Bacardi breezers. Unsurprisingly, we attract some attention in an all-tracksuit/miniskirt/old man shirt pub, and they sing us away when we finally leave. I’ll leave the story at that, but mind your manners around a troupe of travelling Shakespearians, that’s all I’ll say. Not when you’re called ‘The Bell Inn’ and we happen to have several cans of spray-paint in the tour van.

I’ll finish on a serious note. I, sires and madams, have had to deal with my first follicist. Yes: someone who took offence at my character facial hair. Outside a tearoom, a slovenly fellow with tattoos and headphones sulks past.

‘What are you meant to be? A pimp?!’

‘Sorry?’

‘You look like a pimp.’

‘Right.’

‘Are you a pimp?’

‘Uh…Yes. I’m a pimp.’

‘Well, you look like a pimp, whatever you are.’

‘Okay.’

‘That beard! Shave it off, or grow a real one. You—’

At which point I’ll adjourn for the sake of our more delicate readers. Let it be said, however, that the word he christened me with bore a striking resemblance to the colloquialism for ‘cat’. I miss my baby-face. –>

(Verona, Cheltenham)

Our finely tuned actor’s intuition (which informs us, amongst other laudable feats, just before ‘last orders’ is called at the bar) was right. The apocalyptic weather does away with our first night’s performance at Sudeley Castle — the grounds are waterlogged and the camper van that is our centrepiece/green room/tardis is still full of rainwater. Which means that we troubled troupers receive that little-known, guiltily-hoped for joy — The Unexpected Day Off. Obviously, we spend this in as constructive a way as possible. In this case, watching Indiana Jones, eating mounds of extremity-blistering curry and playing LazerQuest against a gaggle of small children confused at why a bunch of loud-mouths would be ruining their half-term.

Cheltenham is effortlessly wealthy, Parisian in appeal, and, for reasons probably clear to everyone but me, home to a statue of a minotaur cuddling a giant hare. The people don’t spit in the street and the boy racers don’t begin their grand prix until midnight (boy racers, by the way, appear to be our only cultural link from city to city so far). We arrive at the venue in our cast vehicle, which I have controversially christened the Drag Queen Mab. It is an ugly beast, but it knows its master. And its master is me.

Sudeley Castle is incredible, and I have unreasonable delusions walking through its ruined towers that I’m a triumphantly returning medieval knight, ready to ravish a damsel and spit a boar or whatever it was they spent their feudal time doing. Our stage is set up alongside a mirror lake, and the secret garden behind the ruins of the castle contains several saucy cherubs doing such as saucy cherubs are wont.

Now, I like it when the audiences like my characters. I know they like Tybalt here because when I pull out my flick-knife the children in the audience go ‘oooh’ and one kid says ‘coool’. The pleasant ego-buff that this provides is quickly overridden by the more serious concerns of why children would ever think that a knife-fight in the rain would be cool.

The peacocks and pheasants are willing enough to join the circus, and riot offstage at each onstage alarum. As I wait to carry on Juliet’s body for the tomb scene, I notice a little family of Canadian geese — mother and five goslings, pecking away by the lake, father keeping an eye out. Ah, the circle of life. Ah, I’ve missed my cue.

It’s a bit like being locked inside a Pandora’s Box and kicked around, touring with a group of actors. We’re still getting to know each other, figuring out if we like each other etc (though any one of them might sum me up vaguely as ‘dies twice, spends too much time on laptop, funny moustache’). But we’re in the battle together.

So please go visit Sudeley Castle. And whilst you’re there, spit a boar and/or ravish a damsel for me for me. –>

(Verona, Brighton)

As my incalculably good-natured companion Connie put it, Brighton is London with a big fat spliff in its mouth. I’m sure there’s a more poetic way of putting that, but I’m writing to a word-count here. I was a Palace Pier virgin and I must say I am thoroughly enamoured after this first date. Brighton is very confusing for a London lad. Why is everyone smiling? Why is nobody screaming or punching or talking crazy talk? Is it the sunshine? The fun-fair? The general malaise of liberal satisfaction? Perhaps it’s the phallic lollypops.

We set up camp in St Nicholas’ cemetery, a lovely sunken garden of a thing; even the tombs themselves are small masterpieces. One of the sepulchres seems to have been blasted open from beneath — more Michael Jackson’s Thriller than Bill Shagspar’s R&J. The rustling trees compete with us for the audience’s attention — It’s not good, realising you’re being upstaged by a Cherry Blossom. Being guests of the Brighton Festival, we await the descent of ‘serious’ artistic judgement; anathema to the bare-faced optimism of a show like ours. But they lounge like big cats at the zoo, and succumb to the poetry and sunburn. The fight between Tybalt and Mercutio spills into the audience and onto an unsuspecting sunbather by the stage. A moment’s surprise and then an escalating yelp from the victim, to which the remainder of the audience hoot. With some relief we realise we haven’t entirely squashed her. Even Equity would throw their hands up at that one.

The seagulls are the worst hecklers of them all. I don’t know exactly what the good people of Brighton are feeding their sea-birds but the look like Kehaar from Watership Down on Creatine and Fitness First memberships. One feathered friend eyes me up as I devour a baguette, and I applaud his acrobatics as he catches tossed sweet-corn like a dolphin with sardines. I want to take one with me.

The response to the show is ebullient, which somewhat makes up for the motley collection of bruises, gashes and decapitations that we all seem to have acquired (Benvolio, particularly, gets a nice scalp-wound: ‘By my head, here come the Capulets…’). I get hit on by a very nice Egyptian shopkeeper who asks me which countries of the world make up my eyes (smooth!), and meet a woman with an entire theatre tattooed on her leg: audience, auditorium, actors and all, inked out in calfy loveliness. I think about getting a tattoo myself but decide that what feels spontaneous and bold in Brighton will probably just seem silly in Manchester.

Having used up all our sunshine tokens on Brighton, we are now making our way towards Sudeley Castle in Cheltenham, and the weather is apocalyptic. I feel like Jonathon Harker travelling through eastern Europe to meet Herr Draculé. If I don’t return, please toss my remains to the seagulls in Brighton, where once upon a time I had a glorious weekend. –>