Monday September 22
‘You are aware we have this space booked from five.” The man is in his early thirties, although you have to look closely to work that out. But then he has probably always had the demeanour of a thwarted middle-aged deputy headmaster, even when he was 15.
Gary [Carter] and I had been deeply immersed in the excitement of the first day of rehearsals when his plangent tones from the doorway make it clear that we are actually at the end of our allotted time. He moves into the skylit rehearsal room trailing a group of earnest looking people in tracksuit bottoms and baggy T-shirts who begin unrolling foam mats in preparation for the Thai Throat Chanting or Icelandic Energy Alignment class he is teaching.
The Drill Hall, where we are rehearsing and performing in London, is more a community centre than a theatre. Hence the chanting workshops and the foam mats. It’s filled with laminated signs, which tell you what you can and can’t do (mostly what you can’t do) and smells of new lino with a sub-note of tile-cleaner.
The day feels like blood is being shaken into a limb that has gone numb. At first it feels like it doesn’t even belong to me any more, this dead arm. There is a flutter of panic. It’s dead. Just cut it off and move on. Then the blood flows and with a few pins and needles suddenly it’s back. I am an actor again.
I am asked to identify the colour of the Jo’burg sky from a selection of different blues presented by the designer. Jo’burg feels far away. The set will be dominated by a huge roll of paper in this same blue that will sweep from the ceiling to the front of the playing space. (Although that is not going to be much of an impressive sweep here as the theatre only seats 40 and is so low I can touch the ceiling.)
Friday September 26
My friend Saul watches the afternoon’s run-through, which is nerve-racking. The first audience. But he is positive. I find drawing and talking at the same time rather daunting, aside from all the little toys I have to push around in front of the camera. I think about a movie I once did, set in World War I. We were standing in a downpour in the middle of the night in rural KwaZulu-Natal pretending to be in wartime France with mud up to our knees and tempers getting rather frayed. A rather posh older actor next to me turned round and said very dryly, ‘Not a word at Rada [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] about this, darling.”
Later that night: It is quarter to three in the morning when we finally leave the Clapham loft where we have spent many hours watching scenes from Gary’s childhood — the public baths in Umtali in the Fifties, hyenas on a sun-drenched plain, a microscope set presented proudly one Christmas in Port Elizabeth — over and over as we lay them down on DVD to be used during the show. The vast distance between the scenes I have been watching and the one out of the window of the cab driving through the deserted West End on our way home strike me — but the connections too. The images were of the little bits of England that were created in Africa for us to grow up in.
Wednesday October 1
This is actually my first experience ever of being alone on stage for 40 minutes with just a video camera, a cokey pen and a few antique toys to help me get to the end. And somehow I manage, even manage at a few moments to have fun doing it. There are laughs. (Why are we actors so enslaved to the audible chuckle? All we need is a few giggles from a darkened room and suddenly we can take on the world.)
I thought this was the first preview, but the dressing room is filled with cards and bunches of flowers. What are they doing there? Tomorrow was supposed to be press night, but then the news is broken that no actual press people have agreed to come to press night, despite the efforts of two dedicated press people. So I suppose that means this is opening night after all.
Thursday October 16
I went to see Antony Sher in ID at the Almeida last night; his play about Dimitri Tsafendas. The theatre was packed with an appreciative throng. I found it a strange experience, partly because I have just read the book Mouthful of Glass and feel very close to the story, partly because it is not an entirely successful production and partly out of sadness that this seminal story could never be explored in South Africa in this way. The play is just too large; no one would be able to afford to mount it; it’s too backward looking, too white.
Sher is very good as Tsafendas though, conveying brilliantly his strange out of step relationship with the world, his inarticulate rage, his inability to break out of being ignored, which made it paradoxically possible for him to do such a huge thing. The brave choice would have been to portray his ugliness too.
A small audience at our show again tonight. I realise how easy it is to get completely lost in this city; drowned out by the noise of it. There is just so much happening here that without press support you get edged out of the great, trundling amusement park that is the arts in London. And that’s what seems to have happened to us. We have buried ourselves below street level in a marginal venue and hoped that people would notice. Not enough have. It must be a very common fate in this town.
But we continue to have fun. For this brief time I am a working theatre professional in the greatest theatre city in the world and most of the time that is excitement enough.
Neil Bartlett, the artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, was in and said many complimentary things. He invited us to come and see his production of Pericles.
We did this a few days later and of all the many things I saw in London this was the most successful. The first time I have wept in theatre in many years.
Wednesday October 22
I spend some of the morning exploring the new building that everyone is talking about here, Selfridges in The Bullring, which is really the heart of Birmingham. It is a very striking dolphin-nosed sweep of massively enlarged sequins that projects from a promontory that must have once held a fortress or cathedral. A striking departure for this grey and cluttered city.
The set-up in the slick restaurant where we are performing takes so long that there is no time to have a run before we start, so there are mumbled lines being repeated as I pace up and down the very impressive cocktail bar. The show goes well.
Saturday October 25
We get a lift into Aberystwyth from the tiny village of Llanon with our host, Simon, and his delightful five-year-old, Erin. They head off to see Finding Nemo while I drop into the local library to try and send off a Zero Tolerance script (the new SABC2 cop drama I am working on). All the signage is bewilderingly in Welsh, which at first I think is pushing this national identity thing a bit far till I realise that the woman behind the desk is actually speaking the language.
It’s getting colder and more miserable by the hour. We find the beachfront hotel where Chris, our production manager, is setting up. It’s perfect. Very Faulty Towers. All that over-fussy, faded and foxed-at-the-edges pretension that one expects from a run-down seaside hotel. As showtime approaches the waves start slamming into the sea-wall over the road with real vigour and the rain starts slanting in. Everyone seems to take a perverse delight in all of this.
‘Ooo, it’s not looking good,” they say, eyes bright. ‘Are you sure you don’t want the fake palm trees standing at the back there. We have them over from some New Year event. Very little of the glitter has fallen off, in fact.”
Despite the weather we get a good turnout, including some of the students from our Big Brother lecture at the local university yesterday. The performance school here has 900 students, so you would think that a few of them would pitch up. On the other hand, it is Saturday night and most of them are only interested in studying TV, like performance students everywhere now.
I feel a curious glee on stage, the sort that only comes once in a while when I know the show is really working.
We go to an Indian restaurant with our hosts from the Centre for Performance Research and I spend more time trying to puzzle out what such sophisticated and intelligent people find attractive about living on this bleak coast.
But then later I discover that part of me finds it very easy to understand. I stand in my loft room in the ancient farmhouse in Llanon that night listening to the swollen river at the bottom of the garden and watching the moon emerge from the clouds and briefly illuminate the overgrown orchard that surrounds the house. I don’t want to leave tomorrow. But we have to.
Monday October 27
We go to set up at Warwick Arts Centre and Gary jokes about my obvious joy at being in a real theatre at last. A place with bits of old broken props in corners and acres of black cloth everywhere and lights around the dressing room mirrors. It smells of glue. It’s cluttered with used polystyrene cups. This is what a theatre is supposed to be! The space is wonderful with great acoustics. The audience is a bit over-respectful, but I don’t hold it against them.
Afterwards it’s just us and our producers, Fierce Earth, who have come down from Birmingham to dispense more of their limitless good cheer. This foyer desperately needs cheer. It’s a bit like an unimaginative Sixties railway station in which someone has tried to be creative with a few neon tubes on a limited budget.
Monday November 3
Our last show already. Glasgow sits on top of a ridge and at its highest point is the famous Charles Rennie McIntosh-designed art school, while next door is our theatre. We are performing in a fine, high room designed as a recital space. Gary is delighted with the hundred-year-old Steinway concert grand the theatre has provided and lingers over his finger exercises with many oohs and ahaas.
Suddenly lines like ‘Mcizi was essentially a labourer posing as a gardener, we all know the story” make it clear that the theatre is filled with Scottish people who have no knowledge of that story whatsoever, but there are many other laughs; more than any other performance on the tour in fact. Even though I don’t feel absolutely on top of my game we come back for a third call at the end and are met with genuine and fulsome praise when we come out to pack up the props for the last time.
There is also the news that the two grinning ladies we had both noticed in the front row were in fact critics for the two major Scottish dailies, so finally we look as though we are getting some press coverage.
Maybe we should have started here, gathered some printed praise, and then made our way slowly through this crowded island and ended up in London. Perhaps had we done that this evening with a murderous South African homosexual lounge entertainer and a fellow-countryman oddly preoccupied with the secrets of his mother’s jewellery box would not have been shared with only a tasteful few.
But had we been a runaway hit I might have been tempted to remain in this universe populated by multi-purpose venues, room-service menus, complicated fire-drill instructions, windowless bathrooms and pre-packed sandwiches, which is the British touring experience. Thankfully I have not been ruined by success.
Background
The Wildebeest Lounge toured the United Kingdom with funding from the British Arts Council. It consists of two monologues performed back-to-back, the first was written and directed by Neil McCarthy and performed by Gary Carter, while in the second those roles are reversed. The actors are long-time friends who wrote the pieces for each other without consultation, but found that they both emerged with interlinked themes of memory, family and cracking it in Africa. After initial rehearsals in Amsterdam and Johannesburg, they met up again in London.