The end of the road...
Oxford is approaching and that means for now, our tour of the show is over. We can’t wait to get back to The Burton Taylor Studio AND be a part of VOTE, which is their women’s focussed season. If you’re in Oxford be sure to check out Yolanda Mercy’s Quarter Life Crisis, she’s a fellow SYC alumni and totally fab.
So looking back on the tour. We have lots of UPS and not really any downs – just a few panicky situations. Rebecca’s been all the way across London to fetch a projector, we’ve had a few scary moments with the ‘Spin Ball of Death’ (as we like to call it) on our computers that run the sound and projections for the show. And for me there’s be fair few moments of ‘shit what the fuck do I say next?’ – the joys of the solo show! Luckily we’ve manged to negotiate most of these pretty speedily.
Guildford went particularly smoothly as it is such a big space and we had a lot of time to tech. It was all a bit of a whirlwind for me- doing the new version of the show for the first time since Edinburgh, but seeing how Rasa’s beautiful set looked with all of the projections was a particular highlight. Seeing Calum’s model box idea illuminated on the back screen with my face three times the size of me was pretty weird!
At the King’s Head everyone had to be SUPER organised and ON IT. We had a very small amount of time to tech, so this included a lot of very quick assembly of our IKEA made set (shhh it’s a secret) and some very clever ironing which occurred in a very small dressing room on top of a very small ikea table (see picture attached). A lot of tea, coffee and biscuits were consumed (and fags smoked), but we did it! Jasmine at this point learnt the art of getting the other voices to say things at the perfect moment during the get-in – if I explain it doesn’t sound that incredible but it always makes me giggle when I say ‘right, let’s do this then’ and a voice out of nowhere goes ‘ok, cool'.
We had a good interaction with some audience in the pub afterwards who first of all, congratulated us on the show, then told us that they were now having a really in depth chat about social mobility. The highlight of this interaction, however, was that they told us that they were professors at LSE and they knew one of the characters mentioned in the play – Professor Bean!
For Warwick, we had our first very exciting road trip. Luckily, the lift in Rebecca’s flat was working this time… she lives on the 7th floor and has all of our set. After a small detour around Warwick (I didn’t know the roads as well as I thought I did to my childhood home) we arrived in one piece. This was a particularly lovely day. I was in an old dressing room where I’d done The Scarlet Pimpernel and Midsummer Night’s Dream to name a few, and everything seemed a lot smaller than I had remembered it being. It was quite a chilled out day and we really enjoyed eating ALL of the café (Rebecca’s a particularly big fan of the mini egg brownies). During the show there was a wee technical issue on stage where I managed to knock over the biggest flat- I think I handled it pretty well though (“Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen”).
So all in all, Phil, Jasmine, Rebecca, Katharina and Rasa have all been a dream team! And for that I cannot thank them enough. THANK GAWD for Arts Council for giving us the money to do this tour and making it such an incredible journey.
