Oldham - The life of a touring company

This week, Mr Liam McCormick (who plays Arthur Shaw) describes his experiences of being part of a touring theatre company. What happens in the hours spent not performing? How do you maintain a healthy company dynamic? What happens when a company is thrown into the face of adversity? It's all here...

Being on tour means being close. Close to people. Physically close and emotionally close. There are so few other professions that require colleagues to spend so much of their work and free time together. A company of soldiers, like the one we’re trying to portray, probably feels the same. When on stage you’re looking into each other’s eyes and hope to find that magical connection that makes for a good performance. However, that’s only 2 and a half hours out of your day. What about the other 9 and a half? You’re far from home and the only things that are familiar are the contents of a suitcase and the other members of the company. You come to rely on both. After a while though, you start opening that suitcase and become bored of the same old contents. You get tired of seeing the same old shirt, socks that are getting worn out, threads that are becoming frayed. I hope you’re enjoying the potential for this analogy. The fact is when on a long tour like this, you’re stuck with both and so it means that the biggest talent of any touring actor is not the one demonstrated for that short period on stage, but during the hours in the company of their colleagues.

I was once on tour with a company who’s beautifully equipped theatre was built into the bowels of a converted Norwegian ex-passenger ferry. We travelled the entire coast of Britain and huge parts of Ireland. In port we were actors, building the kinds of close working relationships with which any other company would be familiar. Once at sea, we were crew.

No longer under the compassionate guidance of the Company Manager, instead commanded by the strict Captain and his First Mate. It meant that in a typical 24 hour period I could have been performing on stage, standing with the Captain on a 3 am watch, running group warm ups, interpreting radar readings from out in the middle of the Irish Sea or being aft rope man; helping to come alongside in port. It was a bewildering 4 months. Two very skilled but very different professions were forced to live and work together. The grizzly captain in his fifties with his stories of bawdy merchant navy life and 5 actors trying to impart the benefits of Alexander Technique. It was difficult at first and often quite frosty. The Captain and the First Mate were quite dismissive. I think they thought we should get ‘proper jobs’. In turn we were critical of what we thought were petty little procedures, especially during what we considered our free time. The trouble was, we were stuck together. On a 14 hour sail from Dover to Shetland there are few opportunities to escape each other’s company except for a rather extreme watery exit. It was likened to ‘Big Brother at sea’. In these situations it’s always the outside influences that bring a team together or drive them apart. The bizarre happenings or moments of adversity. One memorable sail to Bangor in Northern Ireland had seen bad weather prevent us from making it to the harbour at our designated slot. Despite the tide receding, the Captain was adamant that we should make it along side rather than spend twelve hours anchored off shore. So we put on our orange overalls, steel toe capped boots (attire that never went down well with the girls) and manned our stations. As the boat came into the middle of the harbour there was an almighty scraping noise and we stopped almost immediately, engines still running. Unbelievably we had run aground.

So this big, colourfully camp looking theatre ship sat precariously equidistant from the harbour walls, slowly starting to list over to the port side. As you can imagine, this event had drawn quite a crowd. Locals were beginning to gather on shore, drawn initially by the sight of a ship with a rotating fish on the funnel and then more excitably by the very real possibility of witnessing a capsizing. The Captain quickly issued instructions for us to launch the life boat, carrying one end of our longest mooring ropes whilst tying the other end to the ship’s bits. As aft rope man I was given the responsibility of escorting the rope to shore. My heart was racing the entire time. The absurdity of the situation didn’t hit me until a lot later. We were a bunch of actors responsible for a potentially sinking ship. Racing against the clock we took four ropes out and secured them, fore and aft. The Captain, directing all the time from the bridge. As the ship continued to list over to port, it took up the remaining slack of the ropes making the most sinister tensioning noise. That evening, as we all sat at the dinner table desperately trying to prevent our plates from sliding to one end of the room, the Captain praised us as a crew. Not as a company of actors, but as a ship’s company. We suddenly saw the importance of the hours of drill training and in turn the Captain saw the power of free publicity! Our antics made the front page of the local papers and we sold out in Bangor!

Whilst it’s probably not appropriate to discuss in too much detail here, a member of the professional ship’s crew died in his sleep during that tour. It was the most shocking and upsetting thing that has ever happened to me in my professional life and understandably affected us deeply. The support necessary to help each other come to terms with that could only come from within the team. We still had to go to sea. We still had a play to perform daily. Whilst it was always helpful to speak on the phone to friends and family back home, they had a limited and remote role. For those four months we really just had each other and the contents of our suitcases.

I have been thinking a lot about that tour over this past week. We are coming to our last 4 weeks of this tour of Birdsong. We have been together since December 16th 2012 and there has barely been a time where we have been apart since. We’ve spent more time with these 16 other people over the past 7 months than we have our own families. We know each other so very well. We have performed the same play 8 times a week, for 23 weeks. Next week will be our 175th performance. It’s enough to send a person stir crazy. However, night after night I look into the eyes of my fellow actors on stage and the energy, support and commitment needed is right there. All created in 7 months by gatecrashing an afternoon tea dance in the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. A well timed cup of tea or hug. Being wined and dined at a Football Club. Completing endless pages of crosswords. Games of Pool, Badminton, five-a-side Football and Nine Square. Midnight punting along the Cam. Crying over a glass of wine. Climbing Snowdon. Long car journeys. Midnight feasts, and many, many conversations about love, life and work. These things are the necessary distractions and morale boosting, team building pastimes that make a good company. We haven’t all always got along. We’re human. We have differing opinions, moods and expectations, but those moments have always passed and we’re still here, finding new moments to explore and enliven the play and finding out new things about each other.

I hadn’t been on tour for nearly 6 years prior to this job and it’s likely that I won’t be part of another. They always say touring is a young man’s game and I’m 37 with a young family that needs me closer to home. However, I have loved returning to the closeness of a theatre company. There’s nothing quite like it. There are real highs and real lows but no experience is ever wasted. Its energy is captured, absorbed and reused. The best advice I heard at Drama School was that the best actors are the ones that remember what it was like to be 7 years old. It’s an ability to play, to explore, to be curious and be endlessly fascinated by people. It won’t be the ‘shouting in the dark’ part of touring theatre that I will miss. It will be the curious and creative people and their company. The end is now close. I will savour our closeness over the next four weeks.




Some things we did in Oldham. Well, Manchester...

• Liam took us on a tour of the incredible Royal Exchange Theatre.

Liam spent 6 years working for the education department here and has clearly made his mark...not only on the wall you see below (that really is his writing) but on the department as a whole. "Liam!" - cue hug - was the general response when bumping into familiar faces.

• The Birdsong boys played the Royal Exchange at football. The score was 13-12 to the Exchange - so close!

• Arthur had everyone over for a gorgeous lasagne lunch.

 Emily and I did lots of helping...the boys didn't.

• Arthur took me on a tour of the Northern Quarter to show me the more bohemian side of Manchester. Beautiful craft shops, independently run bars and a rather unique tea shop! Which sold multicoloured cake. I was happy.

• We went on the tram...quite a lot...

...mainly to get to the Oldham Coliseum! Where we performed our 8 shows of the week.