Farewell and Adieu

Top Five Keswick Moments from the last three months: -


1. Before the show, I like to go for a short walk round the edge of the lake. I've not managed to do this much, it's been raining too hard or it's been too dark in the evenings. But this afternoon, it's stayed dry and the afternoon show starts at 1330, so I follow my favourite path past the caravan site and down to the woods on the isthmus not far from the theatre.

The path back to the theatre, when I reach it, is totally flooded.

Not the first time this has happened, I should have seen it coming. Warmup starts in twenty minutes, so if I turn back I'll have to run. The flood covers a dead straight stretch of path through a small patch of boggy woodland, and it doesn't look too deep. Plus there's a good, hot shower in our dressing room, a mere five minutes away. So I take my shoes off, roll my jeans up and step in.

Half way along the 150m of path, the dark, freezing, murky water is about a metre deep. I'm holding my shoes over my head with one hand, holding the hem of my coat up with the other and hoping I don't wander over the edge of the path into the invisible bogs on either side of me. My jeans legs have unrolled and are sodden to the crotch. Nobody knows I'm here.

Even then, it's not until I start having to use my thighs to shunt a heavily water-logged plank bristling with nails out of my way that I actually start questioning the safety of my actions.

Five minutes later, however, I'm striding into the theatre foyer barefoot, leaving a trail of muddy water behind me and happy as Larry. The shock of the water has even temprarily rid me of the stiffness in my knee joints, perhaps because I can't feel them anymore. Foolhardy? Or pioneering? Whichever, I know I'd rather drown unnoticed in a metre of pitch black ice water than have to jog anywhere, so this is nothing but profit as far as I'm concerned.


2. Skyping with F and V. F is shufflings round and round the edge of the coffee table, holding a stuffed seal and her comb. The comb makes a good drumstick too, she's banging the tabletop as she walks.

"That's your comb!" I tell her. "Have you got a comb? Does it make a good noise?" I then ask, in the bewilderingly numbskulled way that parents converse with their kids.

F pauses, looks at me, looks at the comb, looks at me again rather pityingly, and then starts combing her hair. V says she's never done this before, which is brilliant - I've caught one of her 'my first' moments during Skype - but it does cross my mind that it might be 'my first sarcastic rebuttal to daddy'.


3. We do a rehearsed reading at the theatre. It's a play that thoroughly demonstrates the writer's knowledge of the subject, the life of Arthur Ransome, whilst carefully avoiding anything that might be mistaken for drama.

After the reading, the audience gets an opportunity for a Q&A session with the author. The audience is mostly made up of local Ransome enthusiasts, a hearty and be-tweedened breed. There isn't much in the way of a Q&A as a result - like the playwright, they just want to show off how much they know about the author. Questions like "have you heard that recording he made for the BBC? Because I have and it's really quite wonderful" are generally answered by other members of the audience with statements like "I've got the one about fish!"

That isn't my favourite bit, though. That goes to the old lady who is outraged that the playwright has based two very minor characters (if that's not too strong a word for a pair of hollow and contrived plot devices) in his work on real life people. And here's the shock horror - the real life people don't hold the same opinions as the fictional characters! O The Humanity!

Once she's worked through the gut-wrenching queasiness that this authorial liberty has engendered in her, she goes on to ask if, in a full production of the play, the writer would consider putting in a narrator. His job, she suggests, would be to explain who the characters are and where the scene takes place. Much in the manner, one imagines, that costumes or a set might do in a more traditional staging than our rehearsed reading, which has naturally taken place with us all in everyday clothes, sat round a table.

This is as close to (badly needed) criticism of the play as we get. We all go and sit in a pub afterwards, and I'm not quite sure whether what I'm spluttering with is repressed rage at idiocy or hilarity at same. Whatever it is is extreme enough to be memorable, at any rate.


4. It's raining (of course) but I've gone kayaking on the lake. It's very still down here, although the low clouds, shredded and torn where they've been dragged across the top of Cat Bells, are swiftly moving overhead. The rain is hard enough that the entire flat surface of of the water is alive with millions of silver beads. These are rebound drops from where the raindrops hit, balanced on the surface tension for half a second or so. It's lovely.

(4b. Later that afternoon, wandering round one of the islands on the lake. Nancy, most intrepid of the cast explorers, walks quite hard into an unsuspecting branch. As the Chinese observe, there is nothing so funny as seeing your neighbour fall off a roof; luckily I am well repaid for my mirth when brushing past a branch causes an entire tree's worth of water droplets to leap into the neck of my coat a few minutes later.)


5. Last night at the theatre, and the audience have been encouraged to come dressed as pirates. We're mustering on top of the set, in beginners, already feeling a bit of an adrenaline spike at the prospect of the final show. Before the curtain comes up, the house lights dim, and the full house all go "ooooo!" like schoolkids. And then, because they're pirates after all, correct this to "aaarrrrrr" instead.

It's an amazing last show, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly from the colossal support from the crowd, who whoop and cheer as though we're rock stars. The show ends with the Swallows and Amazons tearfully bidding each other farewell, and there's not much acting required as its our last show together. Three curtain bounces and a massive standing ovation later, we're done, it's all over and this wonderful collaboration is finished.

Best company I've ever been a part of*, most fun I've ever had in a Christmas show, most professional use of egg shakers - this has swept the board in my own personal Oscars.

*with a tiny apologetic acknowledgement  to other, previous company members who might be reading this. To be fair, you were all shit.