Look, it's an emotional show, I get that. But there is something about this run of four shows in Johannesburg that is, well, not exactly unprecedented, but quite something. We are having a drink after the opening night, we've done the Q&A, it seemed to go well - a friend of a director with whom I worked in London chaired it for us and it turns out that he's great. I need no reminding that this show is a collaboration of many people. my main collaborator, the co-creator of the show, martin m bartelt, it must be remembered, is the kind of chap who finds a pair of snazzy shoes at a venue and will try to persuade the artistic directors let him have them. maybe it's the stress of touring and all that emotion we encounter arising out of the show, we each let off steam in a different way... but i've come to believe that it's really just who he is. that is who i'm touring with; a man who wants these extraordinary pointy shoes even though they are beyond painful to put on.
I am with Zadi, Mark, Mac, Martin, Jacques and lots of other folk, some who knew Kate some who didn't, having a drink, after the show in the bar next door, ou rnew home-from-home. Peta and Daniel, my friends and hosts, have come with friends of theirs. There is not nearly enough time to catch up with friends, but there is an urgency, a need. And the time flashes past and too soon we are in the car driving out of the centre of town, talking about the show, about the venue, about Johannesburg. The centre of town looks amazing in the dark. That's South Africa for you: incredible light, everywhere, all the time, except in the veld where it gets just that bit darker than you can imagine.
Martin and Jacques are couch surfing: staying with someone they didn't now until they turned up at his house. It sounds lovely. It is lovely. The place they're staying is great... and near a dentist, which is good news. There is something going on with Bartelt's teeth. A time will come, I think to myself, and it won't be too far away, when Bartelt will need to got to that dentist, he knows it and I know it too, but he is so accustomed to pain and illness, and so not-fond of their companions: medical professionals. Well, it's not that he doesn't like them, really, it's just that he has a very healthy, far more healthy than he himself is, mistrust of them. This mistrust is entirely based on his lamentable health and the reeling and confusion of the doctors who have to deal with him. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I feel worse for them or for him, and then I remember they're doctors and he is a very ill man and I know who is having the bad time.
The second show in Jozi is going to be attended by my uncle, two of my cousins, one of their husbands and three of their kids. The youngest member of my family to be seeing it tonight and I have a frank conversation about how bored he might become. Now, I've been bored in some of the most important theatres in the world, and I've wanted to walk out of the performances of some of the greatest actors, so I can offer him little comfort, but I do tell him he can do whatever he wants, bring something to do, go to sleep, have a drink. He is seven and has decided that he wants to come. I think it's a great age to see this show. Obviously, and in case by some odd chance it's escaped your knowledge, by the time I was seven my father was dead, and so I do not consider it too young for a show like this. It's an abstract piece of theatre, in the end, it's not full of shoot-em-up images and he can ask me whatever he likes the day after.
I'm more worried about my uncle. I'm not convinced that he really wants to come and I certainly don't want him coming out of duty - Kate lived in his house, spent a great deal of time with him for the near-decade she lived in Joburg, he's allowed to feel and do whatever he wants. But then he goes and buys everyone's tickets and I feel more at ease.
My mother has seen three different incarnations of this show and she always laughs like a drain. She is excellent. She was very, very nervous when we first started doing it but more recently she has been at ease.... but not for tonight. Tonight she is worried, worried that our South African family won't enjoy it..... or worse than not enjoy it, hate it, find it distasteful.... or something even worse for which we cannot find a name between us. Luckily I am waaaaaay past the point of worrying about that much in advance. I only really start worrying about it when I'm on stage, alone, with no way of stopping and checking, at which I become accompanied by a shape-shifting homunculus whose opinion of me as a human being, an actor, a woman in a dress and make-up veers between low and unimaginably disgusted, depending..... depending on how many laugh I get, but not in any consistent way. I can hate myself even if there are gales of laughter and a perfect atmosphere of tragic delight. But of course, I am on stage dealing with that: mother is a passenger, waving goodbye as I head of university again, stuck in the passenger seat teaching me to drive again, seeing me head for my first day at primary school again - she has to suffer the curse of parentdom, which in her case is one of her daughters risking a one-woman show about the other daughter's murder. My mother's private, exquisite, unique hell.
And she is the key passenger, as I step out onto the stage, the lights coming up, the audience disappearing before my ever-surprised eyes, and I tell a room of folk, for the 100th time, that a year or so after my sister died, a friend of hers came to stay with me, and we went out drinking......
