Yelling at cats

Sunday 20 January 2013

I have a roommate where I'm staying in Cape Town. He is, give or take, 40 years younger than me - six months old to the day when we arrive in Cape Town. Zach is a very, very good baby. He seems very chilled out and laughs with ease. He has not quite got the hang of crawling yet and makes quite impressive progress backwards, much to his frustration. He is also vociferous, but not quite chatty yet. There is that moment with babies when they start to tell you things, things you are too stupid to understand, obviously, but they tell you anyway, in the hope that, one day, you might get it. My roommate is not at at that point yet. He's still at the... making-sounds-in-what-appears-to-be-a-random-fashion stage. Part of this involves quite often yelling at one cat or the other, but neither cat seems to give a toss about what he has to say, or they're very good at feigning indifference.
And, ultimately, I think there may be a Learning Point here for me. In fact, I start to fear that the show will come across, here in South Africa, as someone yelling at the audience in a random fashion and I am concerned they will feel like one or other of the cats. I am feeling nervous just a couple of days away from our opening show in Cape Town on Tuesday... but it is the weekend... in Cape Town, in February, for goodness sake. I need not to waste any time feeling anything but lucky and delighted and, well, a bit sweaty. The news is full of snow in the UK, it's half way through January, and they are having plenty of winter action over there.
I take Sunday off and end up at Kirstenbosch with this young friend of mine who I managed not to see for his birthday on Friday night - we didn't stand a chance, without mobiles we were lost... We wander around the beautiful gardens and get to hear a concert which is taking place there for free. It's Jimmy Gluglu, a big South African star, and it's good stuff. As we meander around the beautiful gardens at the foot of Table Mountain I find myself buried in all kinds of my past, and, well, anxiety about it, telling Jesse stories about my exploits, failures, weird times. I try to explain how nervous I am about the show. I also find myself trying to describe how I miss my sister.... but I fear I just come across as someone who's yelling at the cat. I have to remember that he is a writer and any story, no matter how filled with failure and tedium - and incomprehensible yelling - may come in useful for him one day. He, in return, tells me exciting stories about being on a massive tour, about what he'll be up to next, about being him. Obviously we come back into Cape Town that evening and have a Mexican meal, we are in Africa, after all. Then we have a drink with my hosts and Martin and Jacques back at the flat.
As I creep to bed so's not wake the baby I reflect on how darn odd it is to have planned to meet up with this relatively new chum from London, who has now met these key characters from my life, heard some stories from that 'life' (whether he liked it or not) and been with me on some the hallowed ground which carries so much... meaning for me. I also decide I need to yell at more cats.

Those are actual horses drinking from the actual fountain

Friday 18 January 2013

I am in reception trying to make a decision about which of the cakes on the cake stand should find its destiny with me... surely all of them.... when I feel something... to my left. A change in the light, perhaps?And I turn to see that there are police horses, replete with police officers, drinking out of the fountain at the front of the hotel. The reception staff seem utterly unfazed - they come every day and stay for a loooong drink, apparently.
They don't really add to how odd I'm feeling. I'm already feeling very, very odd indeed and somehow they have exactly the right tone for... here and now. We have done our first show in Durban, had a day here, and now it is already the day we fly to Cape Town.
We see Lloyd, who is trying to get to the theatre again, Kline, Tafi and his colleagues in the restaurant at breakfast time. Then I manage to persuade my possessions - surely they are more swollen than in London due to the high humidity - into my rucksack and it's sitting in the coffee lounge looking at emails time. We treat ourselves to a walk on the beach. I wanted a swim, or one of those battles with the sea that Durban provides where you feel it is a victory just to get out alive with all your limbs, but there just isn't time.
Suddenly we're in the car and at the airport and in departures and boarding the plane and I'm climbing over a sleeping Jacques to get to the loo on the plane and arriving in Cape Town and into arrivals and there, across the room is Mark, my sister's best friend, and his six-month-old baby and there's Ikeraam as well, they're both here.
Somewhere in this process I lose my denim jacket. I hope someone's wearing it now. It took me a while to realise it was gone and not just under my pile of things by my bed. I bought that jacket the day before Kate was murdered. I bought it and another jacket very cheaply in Bayswater where I was working at pointing and croissants in the same hotel I was working in the next day when Kate was actually murdered. I had Kate so much in mind when I bought it - it was for our holiday together in South Africa, the one she was seriously messing with by going to Somalia.... and that is how my mind works. This item of clothing, neither here nor there - though I did like it - seems to carry such significance. It's just a jacket, lost in a country where endless people really need a free jacket, and I need to separate it from all this other emotional.... stuff. I have a problem with things and what you've  just read will give you a brief introduction to one of the reasons I have this problem with things.
We drive in two cars into Cape Town. I travel with Mark and Zach. Zach is off-the-scale cute. Cape Town looks like Cape Town does: beautiful and strangely plonked down, looking as if it's slid down Table Mountain and the other hills surrounding the centre of town. I've done this drive a good few times, I've been thinking about this arrival for months, it's lovely to see Mark and Ikki and meet Zach... but guess who's not here? Kate's not here. What is Kate doing not being here?
We all arrive at the flat and Ikki cooks for us. Jacques and Martin go to look at their room in the flat above and then we eat. And then, of course, I head off into Cape Town, late, on a Friday night to meet an English friend of mine who is here on tour with another show. Of course I do. It's late and I'm tired and Long Street - the big party street - is full of partying young persons. Ah, I remember fitting in round here, at least age-wise, but not any longer. No one else in my crue is up for partying, but Jesse has turned 25 today and so I'm sure he needs a 40-year-old chum to help him work out how to celebrate. I stride into town, the always-familiar-never-recognisable centre of Cape Town, and head for the pre-arranged bar. Neither he nor I has a mobile so we are doing what we used to do in the early 90s, back when I was his age: making a plan and hoping it works. 

From Russia to Zimbabwe

Thursday 17 January 2012

Jacques and Martin are going to watch a couple of shows at the festival. I, on the other hand, am off to a do a radio interview. It won't do us any good audience-wise - the show was last night and the radio is not national so will not help with Cape Town - but I do want to help promote Musho! and I like meeting new people.
Kline, Tristan, Tafi and me - two South Africans and a Zimbabwean - are driven there by a PR guy to gagasi fm. I hear about their festival shows, all of which sound great..... if only we didn't have to get on a plane to Cape Town and could stay here and enjoy the festival. The radio show is part English part Zulu; one of the artists looks nearly as white as me but he is, in fact, Coloured, and reference is made to it; I make a joke about having a servant to ZooKey, the presenter, which does not seem to go down too well with her: we are in South Africa.
This show does what radio does so well: brings a diverse set of people together to talk to one another and the audience, who call up, speaking English, speaking Zulu..... I feel very inadequate with just Spanish and French to call on. I'm impressive for an English person - three languages, man... but that's pretty standard here: South Africa has 11 official languages and lots of people speak more than one. This fusion of the two languages is slightly disorientating for me, but from the context I am able to understand some of the Zulu, so I get to feel smug too. And it takes talent and experience to do what ZooKey does, deal with four of us in the studio, driving the desk: cueing the music, making sure the ads play as booked, while remaining open to her callers. I used to be an agent and had a couple of great radio DJ clients... if it were 14 years ago and we were in the UK, I'd so try to sign this woman.
You just cannot do this on TV, and with theatre you have a far smaller audience: radio is unique and fabulous and important. Kate loved making things for The World Service. Usually I don't like to give her a post-mortem opinion, but for once I think I can be sure that she loved radio in general, and the World Service in particular, more than the other outlets for whom she worked. TV was fine, in its way, but radio, to trot out a trope, has better pictures. Of course, when it comes to my sister, please do not forget what she never forgot: the World Service has around 700 million listeners - that was Kate's kind of audience.
Years and years ago I'd listen to Radio702 when staying in Johannesburg and hear the most incredible opinions from those calling in. Incredible to me, an ignorant outsider. It was the kind of conversation you'd just never hear on local radio in the UK: an extraordinary diversity of opinion, people exchanging very... strong opinions. Here I am, hurled into the future, but South African radio is just as exciting, fresh, challenging. I am undoubtedly the least interesting thing in the room -  not very surprising - but it means I just get to listen to the exchange of ideas an watch the fast work of ZooKey.
Next we are joined by the guy who runs 99% Zulu which promotes stand-up. ZooKey gets him onto the subject of women in comedy, turns out they have just the same issues here as we do in the UK with women being under-represented in comedy. No surprises there then. I tell him about Funny Women and all the great work they do in the UK to promote female comedians and the use of comedy as a tool to free women of their fear of, say, public speaking or just, you know, speaking their mind in mixed company. I hope he'll get in contact with them.
We head back to Theatre Catalina before the second show has finished, so Tafi and I sit looking out over the harbour, waiting for the audience to come out, discussing the situation in Zimbabwe. His colleagues join us and one of them tells me about a friend of his who has been arrested for carrying out voter education. And that's not a Soviet euphemism: he was teaching people how they could vote, not how the should vote. He is clearly shaken - his friend had been accused of avoiding arrest, even though on one of the charges he was out of the country and on the other he went to court to try to hand himself in and they refused to arrest him. Kafka is alive and well, I think, and living in Zimbabwe.
I tell them about a play I performed in in November in London: One Hour Eighteen Minutes. It is the story of the death on remand of a Russian tax lawyer who uncovered the largest known tax fraud in Russian history ($230 million) and who was horribly neglected and, finally, two weeks away from when he would have to had been released and would testify against the long list of those involved, killed in prison. Tafi and I reflect upon the parallels with Zimbabwe and we talk about the idea of taking One Hour Eighteen Minutes to Zimbabwe. I say that I am sure the writer would be delighted to see her work being performed in Zimbabwe and it would be ideal as it would not be about Zim while being entirely about Zim. We also talk about getting Tafi's work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, no mean feat if you're based in the UK, but quite another deal to get from Southern Africa to the Edinburgh Fringe.
I love radio and I love theatre - and they can both be transformative... and I don't just mean for the people who make them.

Judging the silence

Thursday 17 January 2013

The first South Africa show is behind us. It's amazing, but it is. I have no idea how it went down, but I do know we got a t-shirt and I that I'll wear it. The battle with the fan in the restaurant below, the one which we had presumed was aircon, did provide a bit of a challenge for me. I had to use masses of voice in what is written as an intimate piece. And the humour fell very differently. I'm used to utter silence throughout the show, despite our wanting laughs, but usually such a big audience make more noise.
If there is one thing this show has taught me, and there are so many things this show has taught me, but when it comes to the audience, I have learnt that it's not my job to judge them. Of course, theoretically, I have always been the kind of actor who says, magnanimously with any show I'm in, we just put a show on and it's the audience's prerogative to make of it what they will.... theoretically. In practice it can be really... challenging, when you've worked long and hard on a piece, it's tempting to want to blame the audience for not realising how funny/tragic/moving/insightful your production is. When they do not react as they should it's their fault for missing the point. Of course it is, you have been working on this play, you know what you're doing. They, on the other hand, have just turned up, having done little if any research, and on top of that they seem to be a bit tired from their day at work, distracted by some problem with their teenage daughter, etc. Come on, guys, get with the programme.
And so, as I stand on stage alone not only am I reminding myself I cannot know what they are feeling - silence is not always a bad sign - but they are allowed, yay, verily, even to hate this show, if that is where they are at. It doesn't mean they're right, but then neither and Martin and I. There is no right here that's one of the points of the show, for crying out loud, Rebecca.
In this show I get into the foyer before the audience and I'm slightly worried about the reactions... but quickly I am surrounded by people who want to talk about the show, ask me about it, tell their stories: the Sometimes effect which nearly Always happens. Of course, I had no idea how many people fled, avoiding my eye, resenting my existence, but I meet some great people and some of them are the journalists I spoke to in the UK, during another life - over the past few weeks. They give me their cards, including one woman who lives in Streatham some of the time, just up the road from where I live.
There's a temptation to dwell on any performance, but there is no point in that. Rather dwell on the beautiful day we have here before we have to get to on a plane tomorrow to head for Cape Town. We decide to walk into central Durban and have a look around. It all looks the same and different to the last time I was here and we go looking for the plaza... which I have absolutely no chance of finding. I'd have no chance of finding it if I'd been yesterday, to be frank, indeed, if I were standing next to the plaza in front of a big sign with the word PLAZA on it and some arrows I might still struggle: I have an appalling sense of direction.
As we walk into and around town, Durban feels the same as it did before, although I find myself stalked by the ghosts of companions past, and even though they are all pretty long passed, I cannot shake them off. Even a school friend with whom I travelled in South Africa and who was such a close friend, who is alive and well and living in Norfolk, is there at my shoulder and I miss her, I miss us, I suppose, who we were. I wasn't even that pleased with who I was at the time, to be honest, but I'm even more disappointed in myself now, unable to let pastures old vanish and just enjoy.... this.
It's very hot and humid and busy in central Durban.... lovely, very lovely indeed. But I realise I'm starting to wilt and as Martin and Jacques are going to see Musho! shows tonight, and I'm off to do a radio interview we decide to head back to our hotel. Waiting for a cab to arrive we see two street performers on the other side of the crossroads, costumed, painted and body popping away to Michael Jackson. They're pretty good movers and nearly everyone is giving them a pretty wide berth: ah, yes, northern Europe and southern Africa are not so different after all.

Preparation, preparation, preparation

Wednesday 16 January 2013

It's odd, preparing to perform Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister. The biggest thing for me is to make sure I know all of my lines. As I've just performed the show twice at The Tristan Bates Theatre in London, I'm pretty sure I've got the lines. And then it's a question of what comes next. Today, having had a massage, it's time for some shut eye as I'm still tired from the journey, tired from the Christmas break, tired from my life in London.
I remember when I started performing the show and it seemed...  unperformable. I think I still have a sense of that impossibility, that this show cannot - should not? - be done. But now I have many, many experiences of performing it behind me and, well, it has been done even if, fundamentally, I still believe it cannot be achieved.
Focus is what comes after the lines, and I start running through ways I can find which help me focus. Sometimes I'm sleepy, sometimes I'm wired, sometimes I'm worrying about a conversation I had earlier and I have to find a way of letting the show come to the forefront for my mind and my body, which is not always easy. I might discover I've had a coffee when I shouldn't have and am all skittery, or I might find I am unaccountably sleepy and need to rouse myself with some caffeine, or that I've got one of those headaches in which I specialise and the only way I'm going to function is to put those painkillers into my system, the ones which basically turn to morphine in my bloodstream, mmmmmmm.
Today I need both to rouse myself and to try to contain my nervousness. What am I nervous about? As we are performing for a festival I have none of the fears which go along with my main role in this production: not as writer or performer, but as producer. In fact, not only is this a festival so I've no need to worry about audience numbers, but we have a great producer who has been working hard to get this whole thing on the road. The festival and Anna are the reason I did an interview way back, oh, at least five days ago, in London for SAfm and why I've been ducking around trying to find quiet places in central London to do press interviews. Anna and Musho! have that all sewn up between them.
But I am worried about how the show will be received and although it's not important.... in the big scheme of things, I am scared of what might be the silence of boredom, or disapproval, when I tell one of our brilliant jokes about my sister's murder - you know, one about bodies being refrigerated or the bit where I swear at the god I've already clearly stated I do not believe in. I'd like to pretend I'm not afraid, and in fact, on the night, I largely do, chatting with the audience pre-show, meeting some of the journalists who've interviewed me over the phone over the weeks, having a laugh with the front of house staff and the Zimbabwean artists we met earlier. The Rebecca Peyton I play in the show is not afraid of things like this, she is cavalier and at ease with her weirdities. But I am not her. I am committing an act of, well, at least foolishness, I think to myself as the Musho! Festival Director introduces the show. It's a pretty full house, there are lots of people with notepads, and before I know where I am I am slipping from beside the stage, where I can see everyone's faces, into the light, where they all vanish. And I pick up my glass, take the whole room in, and I'm off, for better or worse, into our play.

Pockets full of rolls

Wednesday 16 January 2013
More than fifteen years ago my sister and I were doing one of the things that we did - holidaying by staying with friends and acquaintances. Some might call it freeloading, but I like to think of it as taking people at their word.
One incredibly rainy afternoon we found ourselves near lake Geneva with no bed. I tried to explain what we were after in a hostely type place: "zvei" "zimmer". I do not know to this day whether they did not have a room for two or if I was in fact asking if the president had abdicated. We ended up sitting in Kate's Ford Fiesta outside a flash hotel in the thundering rain as we contemplated sleeping in the car. Then Kate suggested we go crazy and have one night in the hotel. Both.... careful with money by nature, this was a truly radical suggestion, and I was still very much on a student budget. But the rain did not let up and there was no way that my sister was going to traipse around in it with her German language deficit, more profound even than mine, to find a bed, and so I agreed.
We had a great night: Kate went down the road for cheap takeaway and brought it back to the hotel where I was running a bubble bath. We giggled and skipped round our room, with it's audibly cleaned sheets and MTV on the telly and legion little bottles of bathroom joy.
Although she was not willing to look a fool by clearly being very bad at German, so bad that she couldn't bring herself to roll out even a word or two from my phrase book, she had no shame when it came to breakfast pilfering. I know we were not the first and will not be the last to live like this, but if we did ever stay anywhere with a buffet, Kate would insist on our filling our pockets with bread rolls primarily, but with whatever might just still be edible at until lunchtime. I was never as easy with it as she was, I have a terrible fear of getting into trouble, but she would merrily take plenty. While a student for a long time she had lived on jam sandwiches at lunchtime, made from breakfast materials from her hall of residence.
Today I'm sitting on the second floor of our Durban hotel looking out at the ocean with Martin and Jacques. Staff are bringing me tea, if I so desire, someone will toast me toast and another person will make me an omelette from a dizzying array of ingredients right in front of my amazed face. It would seem that I have arrived. Of course I overeat and when Martin asks what I would like to do with my day - obviously we have to tech the show and I have to perform it later - but what else I'd like to do with my day, I am in no doubt that I want to go and spend some quality time with Indian Ocean.
But first we have to tech the show. We meet Lloyd in the hotel lobby, he is here with a Zimbabwean company, Zim being the other country to provide international work. He's waiting for a lift, so we take him to the theatre and do the tech. It's a lovely place, right by the sea and Martin is very pleased with the lights. We are both a bit concerned, though, about the air conditioning. It is a sight to see, Martin's face, when the technician tells us it's not the air con, it's the fan from the restaurant below. It's loud. It's really loud. I am going to be using plenty of voice for this show. Everyone at the theatre is so lovely, but I am longing to get onto the beach and then get on with some serious siesta time - I'm still very tired.
I was last in Durban 16 years ago with my friend Caroline. It was then I discovered that you don't want to go swimming in Durban in a bikini. The sea is vicious, and the gaps where you are actually allowed to swim are a few metres wide, but I am determined. It's all a bit of a shock, to be honest, it's very humid, the sand is so hot even my goaty-leathery hooves cannot handle it, and the sea is even noisier now we are nearer to it. I get into the water and have a fabulous wrestle with it anyway, then lie on the beach.
I'm really rather stunned to be here at all, not even 48 hours from London with it's fresh covering of snow. I feel grey and exhausted and am struggling with the idea of doing the show in South Africa, a feeling I have been trying to suppress for a while. We've been planning this trip for ages, but I really am here. And I really am so stressed I cannot think how I will physically be able to perform tonight. But help is at hand, Jacques, who is here to film the documentary of the show as it tours South Africa, also happens to be trained in massage. And so by lunchtime my day goes from really quite odd to thoroughly bizarre as I lie on the beach while Jacques tries to get some of the last 40 years - and the last two months - out of my muscles.

Night fruit

Tuesday 15 January 2013 It's funny how everything looks like Wales. Not everything looks like Wales, I know, but so many places do. Or Scotland. Great big bits of Ecaudor look like Scotland. And flying from Durban to Cape Town I am reminded how blinking green this part of the south coast of Africa is - big swirly fields like something out of the Hobbit.
As I walk into arrivals I am hit by the humidity... and I am hit by the specific smell of Durban .And there are Martin and Jacques. And I am delighted to see Martin and Jacques here to meet me. I mean, I'm REALLY pleased about this arrival. Until about 48 hours ago I thought they were going to meet me off my flight in Joburg - that's what you get for being so busy and strung out that you do some wishful reading, rather than actually taking in what has actually been written by your actual correspondent. I thought they were being a bit optimistic to think they'd drive from Durban to Joburg to pick me up at 10am. I thought, in fact, they were rather deranged. Which is not to say I wasn't happy about it. I was very happy about it - they were going to drive me to Durban. Excellent. And then, the day before the day before yesterday, when I realised my mistake, I was panicky about getting to Durban. Because of that panic I had the great post-panic euphoria once I'd booked my connecting flight. Just one of the exciting, nauseating rollercoaster rides I have enjoyed during the preparation for this tour and, let me tell you, this one I'd managed to cause myself, all on my own, with no one else to blame.
And there they are, Martin and Jacques, looking all shiny and tanned and relaxed (they've been on holiday for two weeks) and pleased to see me. They look so pleased to see me! I like to think it's because they love me, but it's probably because they are relieved to see that I am actually on the flight.
Fabulously they have a hire car, which looks like it's been driven straight through a filthy sandpit and has, they tell me, developed that weird knocking noise while it's been in their care. They know their way to the hotel. There is a big stand of various cakes where I check in. The chaps are on the 4th floor; I am on the 15th floor. Winner! I love heights. This hotel, on the front at Durban, is a real hotel with people who help you to your room with your bags. Musho!, the festival who invited us back in October and who started all of this,  are putting us up here. My bed is one of those wide expanses of calm and flat. But the biggest thing I notice, apart from the incredible humidity, is the enormous sound of the sea. It's like someone's turned up the volume and gone out. I go onto my balcony: there's the North Beach and there's the ever-surging Indian Ocean a very long way down, far too far down to really be causing all this sound.
I cannot believe it. I cannot believe that Musho! have invited us, that we are in this lovely hotel, that I'm on the 15th floor, that my bed is the size of a a landing pad, that Jacques and Martin are really here, that I've actually arrived, that Durban looks and sounds like it did when I was here 16 years ago.
It's all a bit much - I've been on a diet of cake and coffee and no sleep since Heathrow and Martin finally persuades me to have lie down, but only after he's promised to go out for some fruit. Amongst other things he buys a lot of apples. Jacques says it's far too many for our three days here, but Martin says it's not about eating all the apples, it's that I can relax if I have fruit around me. When Martin tells me this I complain that this makes me sound unwell, or at least very eccentric.... but he has that look in his eye, challenging me to contradict him. I can't. He is right: I am far more relaxed if surrounded by fruit.
I go to bed again, determined to sleep: we have to tech and do the show tomorrow. I am woken a few times in the night by the sea and each time I find myself some fruit and go onto my balcony. Comfortingly everything is still out there: this is not a computer game or a movie, it's me on the 15th floor of a fabulous hotel.