Please, dear lord, stop the stately homes. I feel as if I’m in a National Trust themed director’s cut of Night Of The Living Dead, where brain-munching zombies have been replaced by picturesque rural retreats, and each may only be dispatched with a two and a half hour performance.’
Forgive my jesting; this is of course the purpose of a UK tour of Romeo & Juliet. ‘
But after the exotic hurly burly of Romania and Malta, the return to yet another stunningly enchanting stately home (yet another! Oh, the agony) has a peculiar effect on us. Civilized society has lost its sheen. Yet here we are in Itchen Abbas, which sounds like an ailment I picked up in my drama school days. The website for Avington Park House somewhat worryingly rates its appearance on X-Factor 2006 amongst its more historical accolades.’
I suppose we should really have a talk about class. I do not envy the families that populate these grand mansions. Sitting on a gold-mine with no way of tapping the ore —bar flogging the occasional cream tea to a stray pensioner— cannot be comfortable. But this does not merit us being treated like rum-fingered thieves: Benvolio gets an earful for filling up the kettle from the royal kitchen.’
Our green-room (and they have allowed us access to a roof and three-and-a-half walls, to their credit) is adorned with rifles, swords and a Kenyan spear, which, according to the slightly sinister information plaque, was used in a ‘local murder’. I think they mean Africa, not Winchester. Either way, the kettle remains dry.’
The audiences could not be more dissimilar from Europe. The dark masses of huddled bodies that were so viscerally involved on the continent here in England treat Shakespeare as a simple, eccentric, everyday occurrence of genius — picnic and champagne and a snort and a giggle and home. I’m not such a cantankerous puritan to expect epiphanies, but we do try to jolt the buggers out of their Battenbergs with some imported Romany Gipsy flair.’
Breaking news — during our European rumpus, Tybalt’s feline party mask has, tragically, been put to sleep. My replacement mask arrives today and it happily incorporates paintbrush whiskers, mimicking my own moustache beneath the visor. Lady Capulet gets a tickled cheek during the slow-dance, but that aside it’s very popular.’
We also experience a semi-disastrous costume malfunction — as Paris bids farewell to Juliet and Friar Lawrence, euphoric with the smacker he’s just received (probably the first kiss of his life), he starts his clumsy exit. Except that he can’t. His jacket’s snagged on the Friar’s beads. Cue an embarrassed, improvised scene where we try to free ourselves from each other — Paris still smiling fondly at Juliet, Friar becoming increasingly enraged. I begin to writhe my jacket off —an unappealing striptease if ever there was one— but the tenacious priest breaks his necklaces, scattering the beads, and I’m free to go find my ukulele. ‘
Escaping Wacky Races-style from jalopies full of furious, balding taxi drivers, we make it back to the hotel for a few hours’ sleep. When you’ve just arrived in a sub-tropical country and have the ocean lapping at your balcony, this is no mean feat. A pervasive sense of North Africa – warm and dusty, with ochre-coloured flat-top buildings, spiced up with Latin balconies and balustrades.
The only place hotter than the centre of the earth is Malta, apparently. It’s as if we’ve gotten together and said ‘Hey, here’s a three hour play! Let’s perform it in a sauna!’. Our playing space is on the tip of the Maltese botanical gardens, looking out over the busy harbour and clinging apartments. Whilst rehearsing on the camper-van, someone points out that the amplifiers the festival are using are defunct — they sound as if they’re about to explode. Then we notice that there aren’t any amplifiers: the buzzing noise —how you’d imagine a giant hornet using a pneumatic drill whilst twiddling with white noise on the radio— is a nearby cricket. One lonely cricket, making the noise of an electricity pylon with toothache. I think Al Gore should speak to these little guys about alternative energy sourcing.
The stage, unsurprisingly, is littered with giant ants and upstaging cats. One such cat —a beautiful silverback with bright green eyes— manages a double-whammy cameo: during Mercutio’s: ‘Why, he’s more than the prince of cats…’, and again on Romeo’s: ‘Every cat and dog and little mouse…’. Note to Globe: speak to his agent and get him in for next season.
The audiences are so enthusiastic that a few severely professional actors exclaim that they need ‘taming’. I do and I don’t understand this fetish of audience disciplining. You’d be a fool not to agree that the audience can be focussed with a little talent and trickery, but the idea of treating them like Ritalin-lapsed children in a library leaves me a bit antsy. If it’s a wild show, let it be. But don’t turn your back on them for a second.
A word about sweat. I think we’re actually wetter here than in our legendary Mancunian saturation. Smells are coming out of our costumes that we’ve not had the pleasure of encountering before (what do you expect when you hire NT). After Tybalt’s stormy death I lie onstage trying not to breathe and between the heat and the costume and the exhaustion I begin to throw up. As upstaging goes, I’m onto a winner. Disappointingly, my gag-reflex relaxes and the corpse remains un-corpsed.
Malta being primarily English speaking, the audiences are much more ‘British’, albeit a more chillaxed strain of bulldog. I wander down to a local shop and ask them if they have postcards, Irn Bru and rolling tobacco. ‘Of course,’ he grumbles back to me in an east-end growl, ‘It’s a bloody newsagents, ain’t it?’.
En route to Malta with Romeo & Juliet, a weekend in Vienna provides a decadent slurry of museums and fine food and flea markets and cake and prosecco and sculpture and ‘oh look, there’s a big bar brawl outside of Café Sultan’.But I won’t get into that here.The important thing is that we get to Vienna airport, and we get on our plane to Malta.
And then we get off again.Without leaving Austrian airspace.Cue 11 hours of loitering around the airport like disaffected teenagers at SPAR.We break into a Starbucks just to have somewhere to sleep: our rationalization being that duelling with swords after an all-nighter stranded at the terminal would be somewhat irresponsible.Unlike breaking and entering of course.
But we can’t sleep.Who can, with a napkin for a blanket and half a skinny muffin for a pillow?So we organise a prestigious, multi-national chariot-race (read luggage-carts) through the terminal.This is probably the first time Vienna airport has witnessed an entire theatrical cast hurtle through its corridors, enthusiastically inviting other infrequent flyers to run the Ben Hur gauntlet down to Duty Free.We line up a dozen fame-thirsty champions and start the race just as security appear and march grimly towards us.Cue a hectic gallop through the terminal, past sleepy travellers and would-be cheerleaders taking flash photography.There you go — the closest I’ll ever get to racing the Tour De France.
Without more ado we fly by 5am and touch down in stifling Malta that morning, eager for some shut-eye before the evening performance.We note an eviscerated suitcase on the luggage travellator, which I joke is Benvolio’s — it is festooned in brown masking tape, handle broken off, clothes trailing sadly from its zipper.He tells me it is mine.We laugh.Then I look closer.It is mine.
Misfortune excretes in threes, and, exiting the airport, we discover an unprecedented taxi and bus strike.Luckily, the Maltese festival arrives to pick us up, with two small trailers for luggage.As Juliet’s somewhat hefty suitcase is loaded, a pack of striking taxi drivers appear and begin shoving our festival contact — they think he’s a private driver, crossing the picket line.The tension escalates, their vocabulary explodes into showers of consonants, and a short, brawny taxi driver picks up Juliet’s suitcase as if it was a packet of maltesers and tosses it from the trailer.The crowd erupts in indignation or agreement.It’s like something from On The Waterfront.Brute solidarity.The police arrive but quickly make it clear whose side they are on.We trudge along to a McDonalds café, slightly disturbed to notice a car-full of taxi drivers following us, beating clubs into their sweaty palms, or some such.Exhaustion-related paranoia sets in.
Over the past twelve hours we socialist, capitalism-bashing actors have taken refuge from homelessness and violence…in a Starbucks and a McCafé.
The twitching artillery of the Roma-Hungarian border police greets us with suspicion. Our convoy consists of two taxis bulging with actors and a rusting camper-van. The disgruntled searches of the security captain suggest she thinks that we are spying for some insidious foreign government.
Our host in Timosoara - Mrs Popa, a sweet-faced Romanian lady who speaks no English and some Deutsch—treats us to lamb-stuffed cabbage and hot donuts filled with ice-cream. But first she treats us to a press conference. The questions are fairly curveball, and it takes some explaining as to why we should have to ‘re-imagine’ Romeo & Juliet (’But Shakespeare has already imagined it!’). The hotel is awkwardly fancy, though, as I write this in the lobby, I notice a cluster of Romanian girls that could be the classier cousins of Girls Aloud. I hope they’re all just waiting for a vacancy.
They’re not. Apparently there’s a chivalrously impassioned attitude towards prostitution in the country.
We’re taken on an architectural tour of the city, and for a moment I manage to remember the difference between Art Nouveau, Baroque and Gothicism. We visit Timosoara’s Gipsy Houses and our tour guide hurries us on less we ‘attract their attention’ — very Montague and Capulet. Nazi Germany decimated the Gipsy population from 500,000 to 5,000, and persecution is still rife, albeit it under the cloak of bureaucracy.
But what a grand welcome from a city built on a swamp.
We buff company vanity on the colossal Romeo & Juliet posters advertising our show in every square. We all pose for photographs with it, on tip-toes, pointing at our names (Benvolio finds a wall to stand on for this — that’s how tall the posters are). In the square by the opera house, Mrs Popa reminisces about the demonstrations of 1989, and seeing civilians mown down by machine guns. How it was possible to keep producing theatre in those sorts of circumstances —as she did— is a humbling phenomenon. To be honest, it makes our whinging about art council cuts look fairly pathetic.
As we arrive at our claustrophobic, urban playing-space in the middle of an impoverished school, a cleaning lady is wiping graffiti off the wall — someone has written the ‘F’ word above the inscription ‘LOVE’. Perversely, we want to keep it — it certainly sums up Mercutio’s world-view, and Tybalt’s musings on peace.
For whatever reason, and there are probably many, the play works potent magic tonight. It could be the light timing perfectly with the tragedy, the sun darkening with the lovers’ fates. It could be the surrounding poverty, and the honest-to-god celebration of a story whirling us away from it all. But it all came together, and a sort of enchantment poured into the courtyard.
The dinner afterwards is set alight by Mr Popa’s home-made plum brandy, and his oversize bottle of Jonnie Walker Red Label. Time to begin taking a booze inventory, methinks: Around The Globe In Eighty Alka-Seltzer. –>
