Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter - Dream Puppets

cancelled, however Amsterdam was to be our last show,
so now we get to go home a day earlier, and we’ll have
three days at home (instead of two) before a two week
season in Lyon.
There has been quite a build up to this tour: we’ve all
been terrified at the prospect of performing so many
shows in so many theatres in so few days. Only a few
times so far have we had to bump in, set up, perform,
break down and bump out in the same day. Here that’s
what we’ll do every time except once (in Eindhoven we’ll
have the luxury of playing twice), and most of the time
we’ll do it on successive days. For the technicians it
means going to the theatre in the morning, setting up all
day, doing the performance in the evening, breaking
down the set, bumping out, eating dinner on the mini-bus
while travelling to the next town (which could be as much
as three hours away), sleeping briefly in a hotel, going to
the theatre in the morning, setting up all day… and so on;
they will sleep only a few hours a night for as many as
five successive nights. The cast, on the other hand, are
based in Zoetermeer, which means we have to drive to the
theatre (which again could be as many as three hours
away), warm-up (normally we set up immediately and
warm up just before the show, but we’ve had to change
our routine so that the technicians can have as much time
as possible on stage to set up), do our set up, do a vocal
warm-up, perform, pack up our stuff, and drive back to
the hotel in Zoetermeer. It’s tough, or it’s going to be
because until now we’ve only had one long drive (two
and half hours). It’s not the going to the theatres that’s
hard; in France we regularly do 3, 4, up to six hours of
travel the day of a performance (which incidentally is not
allowed in Australia, or wasn’t when I last toured there),
it’s the long drive after the show that’s tough, because it
means arriving back at the hotel around 2am, tired, stiff
and hungry, and then cooking and eating - if we’re not too
exhausted. In France we can at least relax after the show
and bump out because we stay in the towns we play. The
next block of five successive shows will test us.
Wednesday 26/10/11, 3.05pm: on the mini bus to
Turnhout (in the north of Belgium), The Netherlands
Bad news: one of the cast has strained or torn his medial
collateral ligament (MCL) and has gone back to France to
have an MRI. It happened during the performance in
Apeldoorn. He finished the show, although in some
considerable pain, but the day after he couldn’t walk.
Fortunately we had the day off. I went with him to see a
physio and her diagnosis was that it was his MLC, but to
be sure he should have an MRI. In The Netherlands
there’s a three-month waiting list for an MRI, so he’s
returned to France where he can have one sooner. He will
be out for anywhere between two and ten weeks.
Fortunately it’s the same guy who was out with a
different problem before the summer holidays, so we
needed simply to talk through what we did the last time
we performed without him and we could perform last
night in Delft. It’s a bugger (if I could write something
stronger I would); the show is much more difficult -
especially for the guys - without him, and at the
beginning of an already difficult tour it’s not what we
need. We have no choice but to go on. It’s highly unlikely
that he’ll be back during this tour, and in all probability
he won’t do Lyon either. There’s even a question mark
about whether he will come back at all, because on top of
these health setbacks we’ve all noticed that his heart no
longer seems to be in the show. If he doesn’t come back
we’ll be faced with a whole new set of problems, but it’s
too soon to start worrying about that. It’s a sunny
afternoon and the Netherlands is flying past my mini-bus
window. Soon we’ll be crossing into Belgium. Things
might seem difficult, but I can always console myself
with the thought that what I am living was once my
dream.
Sunday 30/10/11, 12.15pm: Golden Tulip Inn,
Zoetermeer, The Netherlands
Two days off – phew! We’ve spent a lot of time on the
road; Delft was not so far, but the others (Turnhout and
Aalst in Belgium, and two shows in Eindhoven) were
more than two hours drive. Apart from our departed,
injured friend the rest of us seem to be holding it together.
We all have niggling pains: a swollen knee here, a bit of
tendinitis there, a bad nights sleep and headache over
there… it’s not very often that you’re 100% for any
performance (it comes with the territory), but we are all
very tired. We were tired also when we did five weeks in
Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris last year, but we still had
the energy to complain about the relative lack of
hospitality, but two nights ago, during the setting up,
when there’s usually a lot of banter going back and forth,
we were so tired that nobody spoke. It was eerie. I can’t
say I’ve ever experienced that before. Last night the
banter returned, but that was because we knew we had
two days off ahead of us.
The theatres have all been big, modern, clean, and with
lots of space back-stage, which makes our work much
easier, and the technical crews have been very efficient.
Audience numbers are down a little, but apparently they
like popular entertainment, like musicals, in this part of
the world, and Philippe Genty is relatively arty and
unknown; in times of financial crisis people go the theatre
less often and so want to see a sure thing. Last night was
a full house though.
The Theatre
Nogent sur
Marne
The big news is that our injured cast member has decided
to leave us. The manner in which he has done it has upset
everybody: he left for France to have an MRI, without so
much as agood-bye to most of the cast and all the
technical crew, and then just sent an email telling us he
was quitting the show. He was injured before the summer
holidays and went four months (including the holidays)
without performing, so we rehearsed him back into the
show, and now, not even a month later, at the beginning
of perhaps our toughest tour, he’s quit; the feeling is that