It was about 6.30 in the morning and I was standing in the middle of a cornfield in my pyjamas being yelled at by a very irate farmer. I distinctly remember thinking, "I should have gone to Basildon". Allow me to explain.
It was autumn in the UK, and I was on tour with a theatre production. We were travelling the length and breadth of England, Wales and Scotland, performing almost every evening for four months.
Every night at 7.30, we'd put on a show in the local theatre wherever that may be - Harrogate, Windsor, Chipping Norton - after which we'd all retire to the pub for a few drinks before heading off to our digs (I'll explain what that means later).
After a few days of this, we'd pack up our entire set, costumes, props, everything right down to the last nail, load it all into a truck and send it off into the night, headed for the next town. In the morning, we'd all climb into a van, or meet at the train station, and in twos or threes - lugging suitcases and sipping coffees - make our way to the next stop on the tour.
That's the touring life of an actor. Show up in a new town, do a few performances of a show, pack everything up, and head off to the next place.
I've completed more tours than I can count, literally. I cannot off the top of my head think of the number of tours that I've done. In 11 years, I reckon I must have spent about 70% of my time on tour.
Tours come in all shapes and sizes. There are large-scale tours that only visit major cities and stay in each city for anywhere up to a month or so at a time. There are small-scale tours that play one-nighters in city halls and tiny country venues. Then there's every scale of tour in between those two. I've done most of them.
My very first tour was a fairly large-scale affair, featuring some 'named' actors. I was an understudy stage manager. That meant that the production company got to save on paying two people, because on nights when I wasn't understudying on stage (which was every single night) I worked backstage moving the set, preparing props, and spending a lot of time staring into space wishing I was actually on stage.
Because this was a large-scale tour, we only visited major cities and we spent a week in each venue, playing in some grand old theatres. Theatrical history is everywhere in the UK. Every night, I walked down the same backstage passages, and napped in the same dressing rooms as some of my stage heroes: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Sher.
We were playing eight shows a week to packed houses. We'd arrive in town on a Monday at around lunchtime, get into the theatre and set everything up in time for an evening performance. We'd then play every day (with two shows on Tuesday and Saturday) until Saturday night. As soon as that audience left the theatre, we'd dismantle everything and load the truck. Sunday was our day off/travel day.
We did that for four months, from summer until Christmas.
The first night in a new city is always the most exciting. It's a new theatre, new audiences (people from different towns tend to behave differently) and most vitally, new digs. Digs is the term used for actor's lodgings (don't ask me why, I've never met anyone who knows). Whilst the stars stay in hotels, the rest of us normal actors are left to find our own lodgings for the week. To do this, you usually receive a list of approved lodgings from the host theatre. It's a list of names of people in town with a spare room that they wouldn't mind renting out to actors because we're good company and generally quiet (so I'm told).
Each entry also contains a few details about what's on offer. A room with double or single bed. The distance to the theatre (most important in my opinion!) Any amenities on offer. Before the tour even begins, you should be calling up these places and booking your room. It's imperative that you do this early because the good ones are always snapped up, especially if there's more than one touring company in town, which is often.
Some of the digs are out of this world. Outside of Darlington, you can stay in a country house not unlike Downton Abbey! Others, less so. The more you tour, the better you get at sniffing out the bad ones. I've walked into a room, taken one look at the sagging bed, the filthy carpet and the bare lightbulb, and turned right around and left that instant. Many places have very talkative landladies, usually single women in their later years who want some company. The most talkative are those that form part of some amateur dramatic society. This is not necessarily a bad thing. When you're on tour, your cast mates become something of a family. Sometimes it's nice to have a conversation with someone not involved with the production. I've received gifts from some landladies. One sent me a card every Christmas until I moved house.
On the lower end of the scale, touring gets tougher. You spend less time in each city, only playing one or two dates in each venue. Also, tours are never (but never) organised in a way that makes sense geographically. One day you'll be playing a venue in the Scottish Highlands, and the next you're expected to play at some venue on the south coast of England. The next, you're back in Scotland. It's a well known fact that tours are organised by two-year olds moving a pen over a map.
Sometimes the scale of touring becomes too much for some of the smaller production companies, which is why after one particular performance I was given the choice of spending the night at a hostel in Basildon or driving two hours to the middle of nowhere to spend the night on a farm.
I chose the farm (nobody in their right mind would ever want to go to Basildon). We arrived late at night, around 1am. Exhausted, we found that there weren't enough beds for everyone. Some slept on a sofa. The next morning, at dawn, the farmer came around, banging on our door, waking us up and demanding money. Apparently the production company had forgotten to pay.
That is how I found myself being led out into a cornfield at dawn, in my pyjamas, so that he could show me how he'd locked the front gate to prevent us from leaving until the bill had been paid. Meanwhile, we'd heard from the rest of the cast in Basildon and they were having a wonderful time in the hostel.
Fine, I thought. I don't have cash, I'm in the middle of nowhere. If I can't leave, then I'll take a nap. And that is exactly what I did. I napped out in the sun, by the side of a cornfield. Good thing I was already in my pyjamas.
This is a condensed extract of Chris Dingli's new e-book, Tour de Farce: Adventures of an Actor on Tour. The e-book is available as a reward for backers of Chris' crowdfunding campaign to send his one-man show on tour to North America. Visit www.baddadshow.com/crowdfunding