I’m on the road, a very proper place for an actor to be. Never mind all those jokes about some people having tours de force and others being forced to tour – a tour gets the stuff out to the people. If they can’t come to us, we must go to them, each actor on his ass, as Hamlet smuttily tells Polonius. I fancy that my generation of actors was the last to assume that we would take our wares around the country. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed discovering all the different playhouses, with their different challenges and opportunities – a chance to rethink the thing. Standing in the same place, on the same West End stage night after night, peering out into the same auditorium, is a recipe for insanity or at the very least automatism.
The show is the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, which played an ecstatic season last year at the Barbican in London, one of the very first new shows out of the trap after lockdown. I was among the first to see it, and experienced the strange combination of unbridled joy at its vitality, wit and tenderness, and high emotion at the return of live theatre. So a year on, when I was asked to join the cast and take the show round the country and then back to London, I felt it no less than my duty as a responsible citizen to sign up. The musical, written in 1933 and honed and trimmed and tweaked over the decades, is a cunning piece of theatrical engineering, strapping together farce, romance and crime into a nonstop whirligig of song, dance and surreal comedy, all under some unstoppable rhythmic forward motion which puts me in mind (if you were to send this page direct to Pseuds Corner, I’d understand) of the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the so-called Apotheosis of the Dance.
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