Globe Education Online

My good sweet mouse, I commend me heartily to you ...

Greetings from Norway! This time, our touring stage was in the grounds of an enormous fortress on a hill. It’s actually a live fortress and the bodies of old kings are buried there, so there is a constant patrol and changing of the guards that all goes on in the grounds as you walk past. You wind your way up the hill and then go into the grounds, which are really long and narrow. There is a church right at the end which we were performing in front of, which we thought was great for us … except that someone was getting married on the Saturday and nobody had told them that our tiring house would be there! She was going to have a sixteen guard salute as she came out of the church, but in the end she had a two guard salute, but apparently she took it in good humour.

It’s a lovely location because even though it’s outside, because of the walls, it had this incredible resonance and your voice comes back to you beautifully. What we really had to do was work on the consonants and bite down on the hard sounds at the beginning of words, otherwise it would just sound like wailing because the vowels carried beautifully, so if you’re not careful you get this “Oooaaa!” echo returning to you!

We were blessed again with the weather, we did nine performances and it only rained for the second half of one performance, even then it only spat gently. Someone came up to us at the end of the first night and said “Good luck with the weather in Norway, it always rains every day at this time of year!” and we thought “Oh brilliant.” But it didn’t rain for us and actually as we were on the flight leaving Norway to go to Germany the heavens opened!

The Oslo audiences have been great. I don’t know whether they were particularly impressed with the show, or whether it’s a European thing, but the curtain calls just go on forever! They give you two bows with a rousing applause, and then we found that the third time they all jumped to their feet into a standing ovation, that happened the whole time we were there really, it was lovely! There weren’t really any jokes that didn’t work. I suppose because the audience had decided to come to play that wasn’t in their first language, they knew a certain amount already and probably knew more than an English speaking audience in some ways. So they got a lot of the intellectual humour and the word play – they were really up on that –whereas performing in Britain you sometimes get a titter, but two thirds of the audience don’t understand those references, but in Norway and Germany they really got the intellectual side of things, they were on board straight away which was nice.

This is obviously our first non-UK venue, so it’s been good fun travelling, although it’s weird that silly things bug you … like by the end of two weeks I was looking in my suitcase and I thought “I’m so sick of seeing these clothes!” You forget that you don’t have your whole wardrobe available and you get homesick for silly things.

We had an amazing opportunity to go to the British Embassy for a party to celebrate the Queen’s birthday (which had apparently been postponed because he had heard we were coming!). Unfortunately, there was a terrible mix-up just beforehand. I was getting my hair and make-up ready with Sarah [Ridegway. Adriana] in her room and then has planned on nipping back to my own room to put on the dress last. However, when I got back to my room – ten minutes before the taxi was due to arrive – I couldn’t get in with my key! I got down to the reception (still in my pyjamas, I might add!), only to find that there was a huge queue! Time was ticking, but I thought, “I should do the right thing, I’ll stand at the back of the queue,” I finally get to the front of the queue, and explain the situation … only to be told by the receptionist that my booking had only been made up until that day and so I’d been checked out of my room! I explained about the party at the Embassy (the hair and make-up helped!), so she allowed me back up to my room to change, but told me I had to pack up the rest of my belongings or the hotel would do it for me! I went, got dressed, threw some things into a bag and came back down to reception to tell the other girls, who went to the desk to find out they had also been checked out … but by the time they went back to their rooms, the hotel staff there packing up their stuff! It turned out there had been some kind of mix-up, because we had extended in our stay in Oslo but the booking hadn’t registered! Usually it would be easy to get another booking somewhere else, but there were two conferences in town and an ACDC concert in town, so there were no rooms available in Oslo! The stage management team came to the rescue and oversaw the packing of our bags while we went to the Embassy. So there we are in the most glorious house in Norway, swanning around as guests of honour, but actually we were all homeless! Finally we got some emergency rooms split around different hotels sorted.

It’s one of those things that is much funnier with hindsight, although I’m terrible, I think I’ve got quite a sick sense of humour, I even thought it was funny at the time! I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to meet to ambassador in my Gap pyjamas! That would have been a story! It was all good fun.

We’ll have to see what happens next on tour!

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