A Day on Tour

"Ask anyone what hell is like, and they'll tell you: it's travelling on a small coach, crammed full of scary-looking technical equipment, with a rabble of bitching thesps and stressed techies, and no sleep. For three weeks. In winter.
Fortunately for those who participate in the European Theatre Group's winter tour of Europe, they're wrong. It's intense, it's hard work and it's never particularly amusing to fall asleep on a coach and wake up to find that your face has frozen stuck to the window. However, it's possibly the most rewarding experience any theatrically inclined person in Cambridge can have."

To try to summarise a typical day on tour, this is how it happens:

      We arrive at a new venue at about 10am. Our intrepid technical director, together with the crack design team (director, set and costume designers) will leap elegantly forth from the coach and check the place out. They will spend some ten minutes or so plotting how to get the stuff into the theatre, then where to put it up before returning to send us all on our A-team style way.

      Our next mission, should we choose to accept it (and we do) is to unload the coach of all show connected stuff. This will take some time, is heavy and tedious but obviously vital. Unloading the bus, and getting the truss and lights up requires everyone. To this end, we run a nice little techie training session for everyone who doesn't know their parcans from their socapex. Essential learning...

      Then, once the truss is up, we can have some lunch. This may be provided by hosts, it may be in random university cafeterias, it may be endless ham rolls, it may even be in a zoo .... After lunch, actors might be free, if they are lucky, to sleep, sightsee and shop, write postcards or any other form of entertainment they can think of. Meanwhile, the gallant technicians will slave away, focusing and setting and so forth until the show starts at times ranging from 2pm to 8pm. Not all the technical types will be needed to crew the show, so may get about every 3rd night off.

      After the performance, everyone works to strike the set and get everything loaded back into the bus. This has to be done right. We cannot afford to leave anything behind, and if we don't pack the bus properly we could be there all night!

      Then at about midnight or thereabouts, we either leave for our next venue, or to our loving hosts (a prize for international relations could be available here). In those places where we stay more than one day, there is loads of time for art galleries, cafes, Christmas markets etc. on the day we don't travel.