Summer Longings

 lt's always difficult when I haven't blogged for a little while to work out what to talk about. Lots of things going on, yet are they things that might be of interest to other people? Well, it's August, and holiday time, and as I'm having a month off from work to buckle down and write my new book "The Working Actor", it would seem the appropriate time to take a little respite from giving advice, and to have a little indulgence.

We just had what for me was a trip down memory lane. A weekend away in Stratford-upon-Avon to see two shows and catch up with several people who I know  in the company down there at the moment. Eliott Barnes Worrell has been mentioned by me before, as I had the great pleasure of mentoring him two years ago as winner of the Alan Bates bursary award at the Actors Centre. Joan Iyiola was a gorgeous National youth Theatre assistant director who worked with me in 2010 on a less than happy production and who has  stayed a firm friend and valued colleague. Elliott was appearing in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" which we saw on the Saturday matinee and Joan was making her mark in "The White Devil" in the Swan Theatre which we saw on the Saturday evening. Both great shows.

I have happy memories of summers in Stratford in the 1980s. I'm sure the town is much busier now, and every other house seems to be a restaurant or Shakespeare themed attraction, but even then it pulsated with tourism. However in the 1980s the theatre really did seem to be the centre of the town. Nowadays, with the World of Shakespeare, The Shakespeare Experience, and all the other novelty attractions that have sprung up, the theatre is just one in a long line of reasons why someone might visit Stratford. Certainly it seems to be harder to get casting directors and other people to make the trek up to Stratford, as any production that is critically acclaimed and well received, will nearly always make its journey to London.

It's a shame, because the two auditoria in Stratford are fantastically unique theatre spaces. The RST which has been radically remodelled from the aircraft carrier stage that it used to be, and indeed on which I appeared,  has now become a larger and yet amazingly intimate version of the Swan Theatre next door, which since its inception has been a huge success.

It was great to see Joan and Elliott. Both of them having a long hot, very very hard-working summer of Shakespeare,  and both of them having achieved, very early in their careers, what must be the ambition for so many of the young people at today's drama schools. Structure is what most of us crave when we leave the training environment. It's the one thing that is taken away from us immediately on that first day after graduation, and a few odd jobs here and there do little to replace it in our lives. So joining a major company such as the RSC brings not only prestige, but routine. Hard-working routine. The White Devil which we saw in the evening is certainly a demanding show on everyone in it and to think that the cast had already done it once in the afternoon by the time we saw it on Saturday evening, is quite breathtaking. A shared drink at The Dirty Duck, where even after 30 years my photograph still hangs in a corner of the bar, was a gorgeous pleasure on a Saturday night. Surrounded by actors who looked on the verge of exhaustion, we were still able to celebrate that they were at the heart of one of the greatest theatre companies in the world.

Sometimes when you're doing the job, it's  easy to forget that lots of other people would love to be in your shoes. When you're getting up at 5:30 AM for the twentieth morning in succession. When you're sat in a trailer in the pouring rain in a muddy field. When some sunny summer Sunday has to be given up to learning understudy lines, just remember - this is what you wanted. It can all be taken away so easily and it can be so hard to regain. I'm not sure that I'd like to have to do two performances of something as energetic as I saw yesterday on a Saturday, but I, for one, would love to have a reason to step on stage once more. It's been six years since my last of the theatre job. Given that theatre was my training and, for most of the first ten years of my career theatre, was all I did, it's something that my soul needs and craves for.

Standing on that warm summer evening terrace outside the Dirty Duck last night, I got just a little whiff of it. And it smelt delicious