The monster in the attic

Okay, break over. I'm back on the road, pounding the pavement, running my marathon, ticking off those theatres.

And while we're here, I have to admit, it's not my first outing of the year.

I started things off with a re-visit. A trip to the Coliseum. For the ballet. But it was a rehearsal, and I was there as a guest, so I'm not sure that even counts.

Still, it wasn't easy. Tears were shed. After 17 days without live performance in my life, the vividness of the thing had me crying by the second piece. To be fair, it was an Akram Khan. 

And I have very intense feelings about Akram Khan.

But still.

At least my eyeliner stayed put.

That would have been embarrassing.

Anyway, tonight is going to make it all better, because I am off to The Old Operating Theatre.

Which is a place where actual operations took place. And is now host to actual theatre.

The website tells me that it is situated in the attic of a church, which seems weird to me. What's an operating theatre doing in the attic of a church? Although, given the limitations on medical science back then, perhaps they thought the proximity to g_d would offer more help than the doctors were capable of giving.

They tell me to head to the same street that the Shard lives on and to "search for a red brick church with white dressed stone on the corners," which I do. And sure enough. There it is. A red brick church, with the corners picked out with white stone. A sign hangs off the side of the bell tower. "The Old Operating Theatre." I'm in the right place.

The door is wide and open, leading into a square foyer. The floor is stone. The walls painted a dark grey.

Opposite there's a huge set of imposing double doors. But these are locked with a padlock. 

An illustrated hand points the way. "Museum Entrance This Way," says the sign. "Through the Spiral Staircase (52 Steps)."

Sure enough, the hand is pointing towards another door. Smaller this time. Much smaller.

And inside is a spiral staircase.

A very narrow spiral staircase.

With very narrow spiralling steps.

So narrow that my size three feet can barely fit on them.

I cling onto the brick wall on one side, and a length of rope on the other, and haul myself up, pausing every so often to take a photo and have a bit of a breather.

I'm really not in a fit state to be climbing anything right now. Not to be too, well, TMI, but I am cramping up like a mo-fo, and really want nothing more than to be at home weeping into a bowl of ice-cream.

Just as I'm about to give up hope of ever having a sure-footing again, an encouraging sign informs me that there are only eighteen steps left.

I power my way to the top.

The stairs continue, but they are roped off.

My only option is a door. There's another sign. "Museum Entrance."

I've made it.

The door is super heavy and I need to give it a great old push to open. A second later, I find myself staggering into a well-lit, cheerful-looking, museum shop. The walls are bright yellow, and covered with shelves displaying anatomy books, and glass jars of badges, and pots of blood-filled syringes which I think are actually pens. A faceless mannequin is wearing an apron illustrated with the innards I really hope the mannequin doesn't actually possess.

There's someone at the counter. He's buying a ticket for tonight's performance.

"Is there a loo...?" he asks, handing over the cash.

"Yess..." replies the box officer, before pointing him back towards the door. "Do you want to go to the loo now?"

He does.

She grabs a radio and calls to someone at the other end. "A gentlemen's just coming down the stairs. Can you show him to the loo?"

He nods his thanks and disappears out the door and back down those narrow stairs.

I really hope he doesn't bump into someone coming up the other way.

My turn.

The box officer is wearing the most fabulous red lipstick and I'm finding it hard not to stare.

"Hello. The surname's Smiles?"

There's a very neat print out of the attendees on the counter, and I spot my name near the bottom of the list. "There I am," I say. "Second from the end."

She ticks the box and looks up. "Do you want to go to the loo?"

"Gawd no," I tell her, thinking about all those stairs.

"Because it's quite a way..."

Yeah. No.

"Now." She claps her hands. "Would you like a glass of wine. They're four pounds fifty."

"No thanks."

Again. Those stairs. They were tricky enough sober. I'm not risking them with a glass of wine inside of me.

"You can go straight through then," she says, pointing to the door behind me. "There's quite a lot to see. So use the opportunity to look around the museum."

Well, I love a little poke around a museum. Especially one that is built right into the rafters.

Bunches of dried herbs nestle against empty glass bottles with alarming labels and bits of human set in heavy resin blocks.

Small groups gather in dark corners to whisper about the exhibits.

"They did your surgery, and then you just died of sepsis! Why do you think they bothered?"

"Is formaldehyde liquid? I thought it was a gas."

At the back, is a bar. A long wooden cabinet covered in a large cranberry coloured cloth of crushed velvet.

"Excuse me, folks," says the barman, stepping out from behind his demonic altar. "We're going to be going in about seven. So, if anyone needs the loo..." He looks around. "Does anyone need the loo? No? Well, there's one downstairs. You're not allowed to take your drinks into the operating theatre, so..."

I creep around the edges, peering into the display cases and steering well clear of the obstetric tools.

"Can I get a glass of wine please?" asks a man approaching the bar.

"Do you have a token?"

He pauses. "Do I need a token?"

"Yes, just ask at the desk..."

As he toddles back towards the shop to get himself a token, I take myself on a flyby of the bar.

There's a sign down at the end. "Non-alcoholic drinks are complimentary," it says. "Please help yourself."

There's a row of bottles behind it. Fancy looking bottles. No cartons of concentrate up here.

I move on. The threat of the downstairs loo is still weighing on me. Besides, it seems altogether too close to the shelves full of poison bottles to be sanitary. Even if they do look well-scrubbed.

The barman's emerged from behind his altar again. "Okay, we're going to be going in in a minute. So this is your last chance to go to the loo if you want to go to the loo."

I'm beginning to feel like we're about to go on a school trip.

I continue walking around, reading all the little cards about alembics and red clove and snailwater.

There seem to be surprise skulls everywhere. Lurking behind other exhibits, stuffed into shelves, peering at me from the shadows.

I think I want to move in,

A man huffs his way up to his girlfriend. By the sounds of it, he's just braved the loos.

"Yeah, it's just by the door before you come up," he says, breathing loudly.

His girlfriend sensibly decides that she's staying safely upstairs.

The woman from the box office appears. "Okay everyone! Welcome! Welcome!" she says and we all gather around. "You can't take drinks in, so you'll need to down them," she laughs. A few people follow her instructions. "It's very cold in there, so I advise you to leave your coats on.” She calls to the barman. “Did you put the cushions down?"

"Err," says the barman from behind the bar. "No... Please take a cushion from the pile as you go in!"

The box office lady beckons us. "Come through, come through."

She opens the door, calling in to whoever is inside that she's bringing the audience in.

We're in a small antechamber.

There's a skeleton in here.

I nod to him as we make a sharp turn towards a steep and narrow staircase.

This one doesn't twist or turn. Straight up and we're in the back of the auditorium. And yup... it's an old operating theatre. Exactly like the sort you'd see in period dramas and the young medical students faints on his first day and has to be hauled up by the plucky young woman who managed to get in despite the professor's better judgement.

Tiers circle around a small stage in an elongated horse-shoe shape.

There are leaning bars at each row, but no one's paying any attention to them. Thank the gods, because I really don't want to be standing for the evening. My stomach is doing it's very best to turn itself inside out right now and I really need to sit down.

I slip into one of the rows and settle on the floor, the leaning bar far above my head.

Knees up. I set my elbows in place and curl up.

My stomach, finally, relaxs.

Perfect.

Realising I've forgotten to pick up one of those promised pillows, I shrug off my coat and use the squashy fur as a cushion. It ain't that cold in here.

The box officer comes in, taking a space in the middle of the stage. Right where the body would have been. Um, I mean the patient.

She casts a look over all of us. "You might have to move around," she says doubtfully. "I think most of you are here, but there may be one more person. If we can just leave a gap for that one person..."

We shuffle around.

"In the unlikely event of an emergency," she tells us. "There is actually another set of stairs."

We all giggle nervously at the thought of fleeing a fire down those corkscrew steps. She points out a side door at the back of the stage. "There is a door off to the left. But please do not use it unless there is an actual emergency. Because it will take you right into the London Transport Police."

The giggles grow even more nervous.

She leaves us to it and we are left in the operating theatre by ourselves.

Two candle bulbs flicker away above our heads.

I follow the iron pole holding them up to the ceiling. It's glass. But outside is completely black.

I have to say, sepsis wouldn't be my first worry if I ended up in this place back in the day. I certainly wouldn't want a surgeon digging away at my insides with only a scrap of British sunlit and two candles to guide him.

On the stage area, there is only a table. Set up with a macbook at the ready. And what looks like, though I can't be sure, a copy of Frankenstein.

I lean in trying to get a look.

Is that the Penguin Classic edition? Hard to tell from this distance.

Still, any edition of Frankenstein is a good edition to a play.

I love Frankenstein.

I stan Mary Shelley so hard.

She's out goths all the other goths. Did you know that she learnt to read by tracing he lettering on her mother's grave? And that dome years later, she had sex with her future husband on that self-same grave? Which is rather dramatic parental-introduction, but there you go. As if that wasn't enough, when her husband died, she burnt his body on the beach, removed his charred heart, and toted it around in a silken bag for the rest of her life.

Like I said: goth as fuck.

So when some black-drenched twatter tells you that goth is all about the music... well, you tell them from me the literature came first and they did it darker than The Cure ever could.

I'm grmuinrly quite excited now.

I mean, I was excited to be seeing a show in this place, but, and I'm going to be real here, I didn't do my research into what I was actually seeing.

The Two Body Problem? A play? Great. Book.

By the looks of it, I'm about to find out what this thing is though, as an actor has just appeared.

We seem to be in a lecture. And our speaker is studying the properties of galvanisation. And while her focus is not on the reanimation of corpses, the spectre of Shelley's novel hangs over us

There are no freesheets, so I cannot name-check our actor, but she's very good. She thumbs through her copy of Frankenstein, her voice quivering in full force and stuttering to a stop as she tries to tell us her strange tale.

As recounts her trip across the water to Antarctica, I shiver.

I pluck at my coat, and wriggle myself into it. It's suddenly very very cold in here.

But I don't stop shaking.

Our actors eyes fix on something in the distance.

I feel a looming shadow cross behind me.

I find myself looking around. But there's no one there. Only my fellow audience members.

Black out.

It's over.

I breath out a long held breath.

And then clap.

Hard.

That was good. Really good.

One problem. I now have 52 steps to go down. And I can't feel my legs.

I make my way back through the museum, then the shop. I pull open the heavy door, and look with anxious eyes at the stairs spiralling down beneath me.

A queue forms behind me.

There's no room for dithering.

Down I go.

This time my phone stays firmly in my pocket. The descent is far too precarious to risk a phone.

I keep one hand firmly planted on the brick wall. and the other one gripping tight to the wooden support that threads its way through the centre of the staircase, send up a silent prayer to the theatre gods, and keep moving, all the way until the bottom, where I jump the last step in my desperation to feel the solid flagstones under my boots.

I made it.

I can't help but look behind me through.

The thunder of my fellow audience members descending the stairs echoes around me.

At least, I hope it's my fellow audience members.

I don't stick around to find out.

On Sundays Peckham wears Pink

I know I diss Peckham a lot in this blog. But that's only because it's so damn hard to get too, and yet still apparently contains half the theatres in London. I've been to Peckham more in the past eight months than I have in my entire life. I mean, seriously. What's up, Peckham? Why so greedy on the theatres? Some of us have to go through life living with only one theatre within walking distance, and you have them everywhere. In drama schools. And old munitions factories. And now, apparently, car parks.

Yup, I'm off to a car park. To watch some contemporary dance.

Because: Peckham.

Anyway, this place, Bold Tendencies, is apparently not just a car park. Or it's not a car park anymore. It's like, a bona fide venue. Or possibly an art gallery. I hadn't heard of it before. But I suspect that's just because I ain't cool enough to be hanging around in car park in Peckham on the reg.

They did send a super intense pre-show email, though.

E-tickets need to be scanned on the rooftop. But the performance is not happening on the rooftop. You need to get a wristband, and then that will allow you down onto Floor 8. But wait, when getting your ticket scanned, make sure the barcode is expanded to fill the entire width of the screen and the brightness is turned way up high. And when you have your wristband, make sure that it's visible to security.

I ignore everything else. Door times. And bar locations. And the artworks on display. I've hit information overload.

But it's fine. I can do this. Download ticket. Fill screen. Get scanned. Wristband on. Down to Floor 8. Flash wristband. Into venue.

Easy.

I'll figure the rest out when I get there.

If I ever do.

Now, I don't want to turn this whole thing into a rant about trains. But seriously, Peckham needs to get itself a tube station. I can't deal with this.

And like, I arrive in Peckham. And I didn't die. So whatever. Here I go.

Although, I've not sure where exactly.

The little circle in Google Maps that is supposed to be me is greyed out and ineffectual, and while that is an accurate reflection of my current state, is not exactly helpful.

I have no idea where I'm going.

I open the pre-show email again, do a bit of scrolling, and yup. There are instructions on how to find this place. So, thank you Bold Tendencies. I needed you, and you were right there. Down Rye Lane, over the pedestrian crossing, towards the Multiplex and up the staircase on my left. Exactly as promised.

I trudge my way up the stairs. Spiralling round and round and getting a good glimpse of the type of rubbish businesses leave on their rooftops.

And then I stop. Because this endless round of spiralling bleakness has stopped. And there's a doorway. And light is streaming out. And suddenly, everything is pink!

The man on the door grins and steps aside to let me through into a pink hallway.

The pinkest hallway I've ever been in.

The pinkest anything I've ever been in.

Well, at least, the pinkest anything I've been in since my best friend's fifth birthday party.

The walls are pink. The floor is pink. The ceiling is pink. The lifts have been painted pink. As have the doors. And the steps.

And not mauve or salmon or coral.

But pink pink.

Proper pink.

Flamingo pink. Or possibly bubblegum.

Oh my god. I just realised. This is it. This is the famous millennial pink. I found it. In Peckham.

And it's everywhere.

I keep on climbing, and turning, and climbing. And it's pink. All pink.

Do I like it? I don't know. My little goth heart is screaming in agony, but that former five-year-old at her best friend's party is squeeing in delight. And just before the two sides get into a fight, it stops. I'm outside. On a rooftop. And all of London is spread out before me, twinkling in the darkness.

There's a large hut over to my right which I'm fairly confident is the place I'm supposed to get beeped in, but it's no good. I have to check out that view first. I can see everything from up here. There's the London Eye. And the Shard. And the... Walkie Talkie? Is that what it's called? I can't remember. Whatever, it's very impressive.

I take a few photos and then just stand there, breathing in the night air down to the bottom of my lungs. But it's no good. It's been raining all afternoon, and the puddles are beginning to leak into my shoes.

I'm going to go and get beeped.

I go over to the information shed, but there's a slight problem. The reception up here is crap.

Or rather, the reception in Peckham is crap.

I walk around in circles as the ticket downloads, trying not to look like I've having an anxiety attack on a rooftop, but being very aware that I'm doing a bad job of it.

Finally, it downloads. I have my ticket.

Screen brightness up. Screen zoomed in so that the barcode takes up the full width. I join the queue.

One of the box officers catches my eye. "Are you with them?" she asks, indicating a group waiting at the counter.

I tell her I'm not. I don't have friends willing to come see a show in a Peckham car park at 9pm on a Sunday night. But I'm flattered that she thinks that I do.

"I can scan you," she says.

I hold out my phone and she beeps it.

"So," she says. "That's one standing."

She rummages around in a box of wristbands. "I don't seem to have any..."

"Oh no..." I say.

And then it happens.

I don't know why. Something came over me. I couldn't stop myself. I made the joke. You know the one. The joke that anyone who has ever done even a day's worth of customer service has heard a thousand times. "You can upgrade me if you like. I don't mind." I cringe as the words come out of my mouth, but it's too late now. I've said it.

She smiles politely and refrains for leaning over the counter to batter me over the head with her scanner. For which I can only silently thank her and offer her my eternal respect.

"I have some," says her fellow box officer, bringing over another tub and rescuing the both of us.

A red wristband is duly fished out and my very sweet box office gets it ready.

I offer up my wrist and as she sticks it in place, she gives me the rundown of the event.

"The show starts at nine. The doors will be opening soon, and it's one hour. It's in two parts. There will be a short break in the middle, about four minutes. Do you know where you're going?"

"Down one level?" I say, feeling proud and a little bit smug that I remembered that detail from the pre-show email.

"Have you been here before?"

I admit that I haven't, but again, I'm secretly rather pleased that she thinks that I hang out in car parks in Peckham.

"It's down the ramp," she says, pointing behind me to the other side of the roof. "You're standing so there will be someone down there who will show you where to go."

She hands me a freesheet, and with that, I'm released.

The doors aren't open yet. But that doesn't matter. I wanted to be here early. Because this place isn't just a car park. Oh no. It's not even a car park with a theatre. It's a car park with a frickin' outdoor gallery.

The rooftop is covered with all sorts of interesting things. And I am off to explore them.

First, there's a twisting set of tunnels. I stomp my way through them, boggling at the sight of leather jackets hung on the wall and dining tables stuck to the ceiling.

Fellow tunnels gasp and jump when they bump into me. One man even claims I almost gave him a hard attack.

It's all very pleasing.

Next up I go over to a huge painting of a mouth that looks like it was lifted staight off the truck of a travelling circus.

But as I walk over to it I stop.

There's a car up here. An actual car. I stare at it, wondering if this place still has a dayjob as an actual car park, but then a low thrumming, somewhere between a car revving and a swarm of bees, emerges from the vehicle, and I realise that it's another piece of art. I find the panel and read. Something to do with the Polish mob. Very disconcerting.

I walk around a bit more, looking at all the installations. But then I spot people beginning to make their way down the ramp, so I figure it's time to go in.

At the bottom of the ramp, a man with a suit and dark glasses nods as I approach. At first I wonder if he's anything to do with the mob-mobiles, but he smiles and the effect is gone.

"Am I going in the right direction?" I ask, suddenly doubtful. Behind him there's a huge pillar of TV scenes, and I think I might have stumbled upon another piece of art.

"You are in the right place," he says, kidly. "Just speak to my colleague over there and she'll show you to your seat..." He spots my red wristband. "Or standing or whatever."

I head in the direction he indicates, and show my wristband to the woman standing there. "Standing? Yup, if you just go to the back."

I seem to be walking behind the stage. There's loads of speakers and a tech desk here. And then in front of them, a dance floor, surrounded by little lights, and seating on three sides.

At the other end, there's a woman wearing a pink hoody. "Standing?" she asks, clocking the wristband. "Yup, you're just around here at the back," she says, pointing to a raised platform behind the seats.

There aren't many people here yet. So I pick a space near the middle. There's a railing to lean against, and the platform means I should be able to see over the heads of the people sitting in front. These spots were sold for as restricted view, but I think even my short-arse is going to be fine. Pretty darn good for a fiver, I must say.

There's someone on stage, having a photoshoot. At first I think she's a model, because she's giving serious pose. And then I figure she's one of the dancers. But when I put my glasses on, I realise I know who that is. I recognise her. It's Sharon Eyal. The choreographer.

When they're done taking pictures, Eyal slips on those huge bulky trainers. You know the ones. They're all over Instagram. I want to say they're called Buffalos, but I might be making that up. Either way, she's rocking it and I'm super jealous, because I want some. But I know I would look ridiculous in them. And not the good kind of ridiculous. The kind with geometric hair paired with architectural glasses. Just the what-the-fuck-is-she-doing kind. Which is not a look I fancy rockin' at my age.

But somehow, I don't mind being less cool than Sharon Eyal.

That was never I battle I was going to win.

As for the rest of the audience, I'm not so sure. There's a lot of oversized shirts going on. And baggy trousers. And massive jackets. In fact, everything they're wearing is huge. Like I've stumbled into the student halls on the last day of term, and there are just piles of laundry everywhere.

Even the woman in the pink hoodie looks cool. Now I see her from the back I can see that it says "Ask me about the art," in block capitals, which is a phrase I'm spotted elsewhere around here so it must be a Bold Tendencies thing, but I don't care, because I really, really, want one now. Even in fucking pink. I don't care. Ask me about the art, dammit.

As more people arrive, the standers all shuffle around to make room for them. But after a while, no amount of shuffling will fit everyone in, and a second row starts to form.

A small group gather behind me. They manage to push the girl in next to me, but the blokes are left behind.

"I want to sit on the floor," one of them announces,

"There's loads of space!"

But they decide to stay put.

The lights dim. People start to come out from a door behind us.

There's Sharon Eyal again, with a cute little boy next to her. They go and take up position in the middle of the central block of seating, standing close to each other.

The music bangs out loud, and the dancers appear, dressed in skin-tight black bodysuits.

It's a strange set up this. Not the stage or seating or anything. That's pretty standard for a pop up. I mean the car parkiness of it all. I'd never really noticed just how low the ceilings in car parks are before. It's not the most logical location for a dance performance. Jumping is out, for sure. They’d hit their head mid jete.

Good thing Eyal isn't really into the jumpy thing. More shuffling steps and twisting trance-like limbs.

People start getting their phones out, taking pictures. That's a thing I've noticed about these unusal spaces. Whatever barriers are broken to get performance of theatres seems to have smashed the normal conventions of watching it.

A bloke sitting in front of me films a short clip, starts editing it on his phone, then posts it to Instagram.

As soon as it's uploaded, he does it again.

Then he navigates to his profile to make sure it's gone up.

It has. So now his 18 followers can enjoy a ten-second amateur film, taken above the heads of the people sitting in front, of a group of dancers dressed in black, performing in low lighting. I'm sure they'll really enjoy it.

He shows it to the woman he's with.

She's impressed at least. She impressed that she takes her own film. Which she then sends in a Whatsapp message. "Lev dance company [heart emoji]" she types.

I can't help but think the heart emoji is a touch insincere, considering she's been playing on her phone for the entire performance.

As the bloke lifts his phone up right in front of me, yet again, to take some more footage, I let me eyes wander over to Eyal and the boy.

They are having great fun. He's drumming along to the music with his arms, she's got her own groove down.

He tugs at her sleeve, and she leans down so that he can whisper something in her ear.

It's super cute.

As the piece finishes, the lights go down and the audience roars their appreciation, masking the music that is still playing.

"What's happening?" asks the bloke standing behind me.

"It's the interval," his friend says. "Shall we go to the bar?"

"Can we?"

"Yeah. We've got like, twenty minutes. It's still open. We should get a drink, otherwise we'll just be standing here for twenty minutes."

I want to tell them it's four minutes, not twenty, but it's too late. They're already off, circling around the stage towards the bar.

Four minutes later, they haven't returned. I hope it's because they just have found some empty seats to sneak into.

I use the time to look at the freesheet. Turns out the tower of screens are actually videos taken in the rehearsal room. So, you know, that's cool.

The lights go down, and the car park is filled with an inky blackness, made all the ribbon of London lights around us.

Trains rumble past, competing with the loud, ravey music, and I can't help but think about what the neighbours must feel about all this. Loud music pounding out at 10 o'clock on a school night, without even the benefit of walls to keep it contained.

At the end, the audience jumps to their feet - including the pair who spent the entire performance working on their social media. Through the forest of bodies, I can just about make out Eyal and the boy joining to dancers for the bows. The boy demonstrates his flossing technique and a dancer joins in, making us all laugh.

The dancers are handed huge pink blooms, which they immediately run out to the audience with, handing them over to people in the front row.

As soon as the house lights are back on, I'm off, leaping down from the platform and racing through the press of people unsure if they need to get in one more drink before they go home. There's a train back to Victoria in, gawd, six minutes, and I am going to make it, dammit.

Down the pink stairs.

Counted out by security on a little clicker.

Back outside and onto the spiral staircase, weaving through the slow-moving crowds.

I pelt it past the Multiplex, past the back, over the crossing, round the corner, into the station, tap in, up one flight of stairs, then another. I can hear the train pulling in. Oh gawd. But it's okay, I'm here, I'm here. A few more steps. I fling myself through the open doors and collapse into an empty seat just as my lungs are about to explode.

Made it.

But damn, I swear Peckham is trying to kill me.

Early to the Execution

I'm off to court. And by court I mean a council chamber. And by council chamber I mean that I'm going to be watching that site-specific, immersive, Agatha Christie play over in London County Hall. Witness for the Prosecution.

I'm a little worried about that. The immersive bit.

I had a look at the website for the production and found, buried deep in the FAQ, the very question that I always want to ask: Will there by any audience participation?

And you know what, they manage to write an entire answer without either confirming or denying it. I bet they had a lawyer draft it for them.

They state that its an immersive production. They admit that actors will be in the aisles. And then they assure the reader that the audience remains seated throughout the performance, But at no point do they answer their own question.

And that worries me even more.

As does the recommendation that we should arrive forty-five minutes before the start time.

Especially as I'm reading this while on route, barely an hour before the matinee kicks off.

They best have their speediest bag checkers on duty this afternoon because there is no way I'm going to make it.

As it happens, I'm sideling down Belvedere Road by 2pm, and the lobby at London County Hall is next to empty when I arrive.

"Are you here for the play?" someone asks as I go in, blinking against the gloom after all that dazzling sunlight going on outside.

"Yeah," I say, managing to make out the very smartly dressed young man who's talking to me. "I just need to pick up my ticket." I point towards the box office lurking behind him at the other end of the foyer.

"Can I just check your bag first?"

Of course he can. I open it for him and he prods around at the top layer before giving the bottom a good squeeze. Honestly, the indignities my bag suffers through in order to support me on this marathon.

The smartly dressed young man doesn't find anything suspicious, so he lets me go off to collect my ticket.

I give my name, and one of the two box officers behind the counter digs it out for me. There's a display of programmes, with a sign. Four pounds. Cash only.

Four pounds is fair enough, but what's this 'cash only' nonsense? Surely the whole point of buying one at the counter rather than off one of the front of housers in the auditorium is so that you can use a card. Do they not have a card machine back there? How on earth do they manage to deal with walk-ups without one? Perhaps this is a more immersive experience that I had anticipated. We really are being sent back to 1953, and I need to find myself some shillings quick because decimalisation hasn't hit yet and the box officer is going to look at my fiver as if I just handed him a membership card to crazy town.

But the box officer takes my note and gives me change without fuss.

I'm almost disappointed. All of that build up and I managed to get through the doors within three minutes. What am I supposed to do with the other twenty-seven? I hang around in the lobby. It's very impressive. Mosaic tiled flooring with some sort of crest action going on. A fireplace. Stone carvings. It is just like being in an episode of Poirot. I full expect to see David Suchet strolling though one of those glass-paned doors muttering about 'the little grey cells.'

I take a few photos. But after that, I soon run out of things to do.

It's time to go in.

Two ushers flag the very grand looking staircase. Behind them looks a high iron fence which I presume they use to lock us all in once we've been found guilty.

I show my ticket to the closest one.

"Central Gallery," she says, reading it. "Up the stairs and to the left."

Signs pointing out directions to all the different doors are wrapped around the massive marble pillars, as thick as tree trunks.

I check my ticket.

I'm after door number seven.

The nearest pillar says that doors four to nine are on the left.

A front of houser catches me looking at the pillar, and he gives a here-to-help kinda smile.

"Is door seven this way?" I ask, pointing in the direction of the arrow on the sign.

"It's just through here," he says, indicating a doorway behind him. The exact opposite direction of the arrow.

Good thing he's there, I guess. Having a front of houser on duty by the door is definitely a lot more efficient than accurate signage.

I go through the door. There's a stairwell in here. Considerably less grand than the marble monstrosity behind me.

Up I go. And up. And up. Everything becomes that bit less stately the higher I go.

These are clearly the town hall version of theatre's povvo stairs.

I'm not after a drink though. I'm still trying to locate door seven.

The signs send me off to the right.

Down a corridor with windows overlooking a grim looking courtyard.

And there, on the left, are a few steps leading up to a door.

Door seven, according to the sign. There's even a crest on it. The Royal coat of arms that is used by government departments. Dieu et mon droit and all that.

Inside, I find the gallery. Long leather covered benches with an impossibly steep rake.

But I don't even have the chance to contemplate those dangerous-looking steps because my attention is entirely focussed on the other side. The view.

A courtroom.

Sort of.

Not like any courtroom that I've seen before. Even on TV.

Concentric circles of leather chairs surrounding a raised stage.

The judges' bench looks over it, and the figure of Justice presides over the entire thing. Sword in hand. It's enough to make me feel like I've done something very very wrong. Justice may be blind, but Guilt has frickin' laser vision.

I should probably go find my seat.

I wobble my way up the very narrow steps up to the back row.

I presume that's where I'm sitting. Row D. That's the onetwothree - fourth row back.

I peer at the benches. I don't see any seat numbers. Or any indication of what row it is.

Oh wait. There's something. On the ground. I can't make it out. It's so gloomy up here.

I get out my phone and light up my screen, directing it towards the floor.

Ah, there we go. Tiny seat numbers on tiny plaques.

I shuffle my way into the row.

It's really high up here.

Like, really high.

At least the rake is good though. At least, I think it is. There's no one sitting in the row in front just yet. There's no one in this entire gallery. I'm sitting up here all by myself. I'm starting to think that I'm the only one who actually read the FAQs on the website.

Eventually, someone else turns up. He stares at the rows for a long minute, bending over and squinting at the ground before he too gets out his phone to help light the way.

"The seat numbers are on the floor," I say, feeling helpful.

"I was just checking I was in row C," he replies.

This becomes a pattern. New people coming in. Them blinking in confusion at the floor. The emergence of their phone. And then one or other of us passing on a vital piece of information.

"That's row B."

"The one at the end is seat 30."

"No, you've come through the wrong door."

"Seriously, there's no seat number 10 here."

"What door number does it say on your ticket?"

"Well, then perhaps that's the door you should have taken."

"Don't get pissy with me."

"Fucking bitch."

I jest.

I didn't say any of that.

I sure thought it though.

I got quite worked up. I'm really warm now. There are fans blasting up here, but they are pointed up, and cooling nothing but the ceiling. I need a drink.

I make my way back down the very steep steps, holding onto the balustrade very tightly as I go. People wander round the corridors looking lost, holding tickets in front of their faces and muttering door numbers to themselves.

I leave them to fend for themselves and wind my way back to the bar.

The queue stretches all the way across the little foyer and out into the opposite corridor.

That is... way too much effort for a gin and tonic.

Thankfully, there are a couple of jugs of water on the table behind, with a stack of cups nearby.

"Can I help myself to water?" I ask. Just in case it was special legal water or something.

"Yeah, go for it," says the woman behind the bar with a wave of her hand.

Super.

Armed with my cup of water, I stumble my way back to my seat.

More people are in now. But I still have my entire bench to myself. That's rather pleasing. I quite fancy the idea of sprawling around up here with my cup of water in my hand, and my fan in the other, lording it over all those fools below who spent real money on their tickets just to be cooped up in chairs. With armrests.

Suckers.

Wait.

Hang on. What is that?

The group of old ladies sitting in the front row have put something on the stage and are pushing it around between them.

I dig my glasses out of my bag to get a better look.

It's a box of Maltesers.

They're treating the stage as if it were the conveyer belt in YO! Sushi, sliding their snacks around between them.

Hell maybe other people, but they save a special layer of it saved for weekday matinee audiences.

A front of houser closes the door, sealing us all in together in our sweltering inferno,

At least I got my whole row to myself.

As soon as I think it, I regret it. The theatre gods, they be listening, and they be cruel. And just as I am cursing myself internally, the door opens once more, and two men come in, heading straight for my row.

They probably don't deserve the death glare I sent shooting their way, but it's too late now, the show is starting.

Or at least, the pre-show is.

An actor, who according to the programme is Karlina Grace-Paseda, and is playing the role of Stenographer comes out when a rather nice suit, to swear in the jury.

I hadn't noticed them before. Two rows of seats, tucked up next to the judges' bench.

She hands them a bible and a piece of card, and each one in turn holds up the book in one and reads from the card in the other.

There's two seats still unoccupied. Ten members of the jury. I'm not sure this is a fair trial.

I wonder what they do in these situations. Bring in some more people from the stalls?

But as their lights dim, those two seats remain unoccupied. Making a mockery of this entire process.

Still, no time to think of that. A man is being dragged on stage and is about to be hanged and I have never been so glad to be sitting high up in the gallery before that is alarming as fuck.

It really doesn't look good for him.

Not even when, fifteen minutes in, the doors open once more and the two missing jury members are slipped in.

I keep a close eye on them, but they're more interested in the business of folding up their coats and getting comfy then what is happening on stage.

I think Lewis Cope's Leonard Vole should demand a retrial.

Although, I'm not sure I could handle that.

The fans are off, and while they weren't doing much, at least I knew they were trying.

"It's so warm!" says a lady as we all make our escape in the interval.

She's not wrong.

I head for the corridor and hang out next to an open window overlooking a grey courtyard, and try to cool off.

My little perch turns out to be rather popular and I'm soon surrounded by a bunch of ice cream eaters discussing the case.

Well, I say ice cream eaters but...

"I think one of the lawyers did it," says one, as she stares blankly at her tub.

"Really? I think it's a double jeopardy situation," says another as he watches her struggle. "It's under the lid."

"Double jeopardy? I don't understand how that works. What do you mean under the lid?"

"So, he can't be tried again. Here, the spoon's under that card."

"Oh, I see!" she says, retrieving the little spoon. "Nah. I still think it was the lawyer."

"That's... an interesting theory."

It is an interesting theory. But not one that I can weigh in on. Because I already know the ending. I say the TV adaptation a couple of years ago, and I remember the general gist of it.

Then again, the play might be different. We don't know which way that jury is going to go. Those two latecomers may be the key to overturning everything.

As I go back in, the Stenographer is swearing them in. Better late then never I suppose.

There seems to be something else going on now.

The members of the jury are being asked to write something.

They tear pages out of their notebooks.

Two pages each.

I think we can guess what they're writing.

Guilty on one.

Not guilty on the other.

Looks like we're having a Blue Peter trial.

Here's a verdict I made earlier!

It's not looking good though.

When the judge, Michael Cochrane, comes out, he lays down a pair of white gloves and a black cloth in front of him.

No explanation is needed. We all know what that means. The black cloth is still in the public consciousness even if it's not on our judges' heads anymore.

Although, with Priti Patel as home secretary, there'll probably be handing them out at every county court in the country by the end of the year.

When the time comes, the stenographer goes over to the jury, and they hand over their pieces of paper.

A jury member stands. And she reads out the verdict.

Very well done. A lovely clear voice. Although she should probably have put down her coat beforehand.

During the bows, the actors all point to her, and she gets her own round of applause. And a spotlight.

Nice.

Time to go.

At the bottom of the stairs, there's a A-board.

"Remember you are #SwornToSecrecy but share your pictures of the chamber with us."

I stop to take a photo.

Someone asks an usher where the toilets are. She points out to a door. A door leading to the courtyard.

Huh.

Now, I'm not a theatre loo-goer. I tend to avoid that whole... situation. It's fine. I have a bladder of steel.

But this intrigues me.

I follow the directions, out through the door, and do indeed end up in that grey courtyard I'd seen from the corridor window,

There's a little cabin out here. Wooden. With two doors.

One has a queue stretching out of it.

I don't need to read the signs to know which is the ladies.

A woman standing behind me tuts. "Always the way, isn't it?"

Yeah.

I join the queue.

Inside there are two stalls and two sinks. The counter is flooded with water. The floor of the stalls is a mess of loo roll.

There's nowhere to hang your bag. I stare at the filthy floor and contemplate my options before managing to balance the strap over the door lock.

There's a no touch flush, but when I go to wash my hands I can't figure out the tap.

"Am I being dim?" I ask the queue, waving my hands under the spout thinking the no touch technology must extend to the clean up.

The lady next in line pushes a slim button and a shoot of water spurts out. It lasts all of two seconds.

By the time I get out, the queue has grown. It stretches across the courtyard, and all the way through the doors and back into the lobby.

The men's is, of course, empty.

Honestly, this is why I don't pee at the theatre.

This is not what I want from my theatrical excursions, or indeed, from life.

Lost Souls and Yeast Rolls

I've had a sandwich and a mango smoothie, and I am really to get back on the double-show day train. I'm also really to go back on the trail of the Camden Fringe after taking a little break to check out the off-West End transfer of The Barbershop Chronicles at the Roundhouse this afternoon.

I'm actually not going that far. From Chalk Farm to Camden Square. Meaning I have plenty of time to write in between. Almost a whole blog post, handwritten in my notebook because I'm old, and can't type fast enough on a touchscreen to keep up with my thoughts. Just need to type it up when I get home and finish it off. I'm feeling very virtuous right now. Although that could just be the mango smoothie kicking in.

Whatever it is, I'm feeling pretty good standing here outside my second venue of the day: the London Irish Centre.

Yeah, yeah. I can hear what you're saying. "Maxine! That really isn't a theatre..."

And yes, you're right. It isn't. It's an Irish centre. In London.

But where Camden Fringe goes, I must follow. So here I am.

It looks nice enough. One of those great big stucco-fronted houses. It's opposite a park. It's the kind of place Russian billionaires buy as a fifteenth home.

I walk slowly up the steps towards the entrance. There's a stepladder taking up most of the doorway, with just a pair of legs visible against the gloom of the interior.

As I approach, the legs descend, and I manage to squeeze past.

There's a doormat with the words "Tá fáilte romhat" printed on it in black. Google translate tells me this means "You are welcome."

I do like a friendly doormat.

Inside it's all leather-upholstered chesterfield sofas and dark wood furniture. There's a piano. And twin Irish flags. One either side of the room.

What there doesn't seem to be though, is any form of box office.

I head towards the bar. Helpfully signposted with THE BAR writ large over the doorway in massive letters. Inside there are a few blokes standing around having a drink, but no box office.

Okay then. I try the other doorway, this one leading to a corridor. There are signs for various events, but not the one I'm going to. I make it all the way down the corridor before realising I'm now just randomly wandering around a cultural institute that I have no business wandering around in.

On my way back, I spot a young man wearing a logoed up polo-shirt.

"Hi," I say, catching his eye. "I'm looking for I Know It Was The Blood?"

He looks alarmed, and I'm not surprised. That's one hell of a title.

"Is that..." he starts.

"Camden Fringe," I say, as if that explains everything.

His face clear, so it presumably does.

"Camden Fringe is just along the corridor there, but I'm not sure it's open. There should be a man doing the box office."

Well, as long as there should be a man...

I thank him and head back to the sofa-filled foyer.

And there is a man. With a clipboard.

"Are you for...?" he starts.

I try out the magic words once more: "Camden Fringe."

They work.

"That's me! What's the name?”

"Smiles."

"Maxine?"

I nod.

"I'll take everyone though at half past," he says, before moving on to the next person.

He asks a few more people if they're there for Camden Fringe. They're not. There's another event tonight and sure enough, a table is set up next to the entrance and we've got a rival box office going.

As newcomers are sent away from the table, Camden Fringers are left wandering around, not knowing what to do.

A divide forms.

Camden Fringers congregating in the corridor. Rival eventers on the chesterfields.

"Are you here for the event tonight?" says the rival box officer, coming over to the sofas to collect her brood. "Do you want to come over to the desk so I can get you signed in?"

There's something very different about the two groups. I don't want to say that it's race, but... it's race.

And although my Karen-like appearance would make it seem like I should be hanging out with the sofa-society, I'm actually with the corridor-collective this evening.

The man with the clipboard reappears. "You can go in and take your seat now," he tells me before touring the sofas with a call of "Fringe? Camden Fringe?"

Down a side corridor, and the door to our theatre for this evening is being held open by a young woman. "Welcome!" she says to each of us in turn as we go in. "Apologies, we had some technical difficulties," she says. explaining the late start. "Welcome. Thank you for being so patient."

And in we go.

The room kind of reminds me of the one at Cecil Sharp House. White walls. Windows. Very much a room and not a theatre.

Although there is a stage. A little one.

There are free sheets on the seats. I always appreciate a show which puts freesheets out on the seats.

I take my favourite place, end of the third row. But that's more of an awareness of this show really not being meant for me, and not wanting to take the best seats away from the target audience here.

Turns out however, the third row is much in demand. Over on the right-hand side, the third row fills up almost instantly.

On the left side, where I am, a lady sits down in the second row before bouncing back up from her seat. "Too close," she announces, before moving back a row, a few seats down from me.

The young woman who greeted us takes up a spot in the front row, ready with a camera to film the show.

Once we're all settled, the room fills with music. Singing.

I turn around in my seat. It's Tara Lake. And she has got a voice on her.

She walks down the aisle, carrying a big tote bag, which she sets down at the front.

She shows us the book she's holding. A bible for the Newfangled Woman. She reads a few verses.

And then she takes on a journey, through her family and personal history. From the members who just refuse to stop living, to her parents who won't stay divorced, and her own stubborn refusal to not take a job that is clearly not suitable for a teenage girl. We hear how she lost her music, and found it again, and all the while are treated to that voice.

Every-so-often she pauses to explain an Americanism that we don't understand.

But there's one that left us puzzled.

"Whether you like it or not, you're all my cousins now," says Lake, giving her closing speech after the applause has died down, thanking us all, Camden Fringe, and most especially the young woman in the front row, Day Alaba.

My neighbour on the third row leans over to me. "Yes, but do we get yeast rolls?"

"Now that's a question!"

Yeast rolls played an important role in Lake's narrative. They were there on the table when her parents had their divorce dinner. They were there when she came out to them.

I don't know what they are, but they sound delicious.

And emotionally troubling.

Lake takes up post by the side of the door to see us off.

A line builds to give her their email addresses ("I promise I won't spam you!").

"So, yeast rolls," says my neighbour. "What are they?"

Lake laughs. "Puffed. Greasy..."

"Fattening!" pipes up Alaba from the front row.

In other words: delicious.

I thank Lake on my way out. "That was wonderful." It really was.

Outside on the steps, a pretty cat sits and watches as we leave.

We each in turn pause to give her a pat on the head.

She doesn't seem to mind.

I rather think that's what she's there for.

On the way home I Google yeast rolls. Looks like they are an enriched loaf. Like brioche. Or challah.

Definitely delicious then.

I really love challah.

Like... really love it...

Soft Hearts, Wet Sponges

I'm at the Iris Theatre tonight for a bit of outdoor promenading. This is a first for me. Not the outdoor promenading (though it may be... I can't think of one I might have done before) but the going to the Iris.

I have however been to St Paul's. No, not that St Paul's. The one in Convent Garden. The one that's called the Actors' Church to avoid exactly this confusion.

Back in my interning days in the West End, I would come here during my lunch break, to sit in the gardens, eat my sandwich, and try to convince myself that giving up my sweet corporate job to start again at the bottom, and in the arts of all things, was absolutely a good life decision.

That came to an end when I accidentally gatecrashed a funeral.

Yeah.

I mean, in my defence, they usually would close the gates when there was a service. But for some reason they just let me saunter on in without comment that day.

Probably because my look is very... black. It's black. I wear a lot of black.

I decided to have my lunches elsewhere after that, and my next job was in Deptford, which was a bit far to think of coming back for a sandwich.

Anyway, I am back. Without a Tesco meal deal in hand.

After walking around the block, trying to work out what entrance I needed to use, I join the queue going through the tunnel from King Street.

The queue is moving slowly. Mainly because the one box officer on duty has to tell everyone the photography policy.

"Absolutely no photography after this point," he says. "No photos can be taken after go through. If we see you taking a photo, we will ask you to delete it."

Wow. That's one hard line.

Still, at least it gives me plenty of opportunity to contemplate the signage telling us that it'll cost us fifty pee to spend a penny at the nearest public loos. And I thank the theatre gods that I have resisted every attempt to make me review theatre loos. Seriously, I'm not doing it. You can't make me. I don't want to.

A group a few places ahead asks where they should sit.

"For now sit anywhere you like," says the box officer. "It's a promenade performance so you'll move around." They don't look overly satisfied with this answer. "I don't want to spoil the surprise!"

That does the trick. They move on.

Eventually, I shuffle my way up to the front and give my name.

There's a basket of programmes on the desk, and as he checks my name off the list, I pull three pounds out of my purse in readiness.

"Here's your ticket," he says, handing me a small scrap of paper with the Iris Theatre logo. He spots the coins in my hand. "Are you after a programme?"

"Yes please!"

He's so distracted about the business of programme-selling that he neglects to give me the photography spiel which I take to mean that I now have plausible deniability on the rules.

The little terrace area just in front of the church looks like it's been boarded off. Huge brown-painted screens are keeping us in one corner. There are benches. And a bar.

The programmes are very handsome, with the church bells, and the title treatment proclaiming "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" over the backdrop of old Paris.

I risk a photo of it.

No one arrests me. Or asks me to delete it.

I contemplate the hoarding, wondering if I can get a shot of that.

There's a sign.

"Please no photography beyond this point."

I stare at it. Do they mean the area beyond the boards, or are they including our little holding area here?

I aim my camera upwards and take a photo of the bunting. Surely there cannot be any harm in bunting-photos. It's pretty bunting. Red, white, blue. Very cheerful. Very liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Not super 1482, but then, nor are the candle-flame bulb lights woven in with it. I don't think they pinned candles to bunting even in the 15th century. Candles were expensive. They wouldn't waste them on all this peasanty frippery. Plus, fire. But then again... medieval times.

Still, it's all very jolly.

The benches are all taken now, but I find a convient low wall to perch on.

Without anywhere to sit, people are starting to gather near the blocked off bit.

"I feel we're just moving about," somewhere says as they push their way as close to the hoarding as they can get.

I feel you are too.

A secondary queue forms near the other possible entrance. This one a wooden doorway, topped with a gothic arch and closed off with a green velvet curtain, complete with tassels.

"Ooo," says someone. "Maybe it starts here."

High above us, the church bell dongs seven times in what has the be the most dramatic use of the theatre bell I've heard in this marathon.

A man looks up towards the bell tower. "I wonder if they're setting it here because the venue has been burnt down..."

He pauses.

"Yes... it's a tragedy."

A lady sitting behind me is laying down some theatre truths. "Of course, I like going to West End shows," she says to the person she's with. "But I like to go to the fringe theatres because they put on the more interesting things. They can afford to take more risks which the big theatres can't with their overhead."

I want to raise my hand and offer her a "Preach, theatre-sister!" but I don't want to draw attention to myself. I'm still trying to get a decent photo of this place.

But it's too late now. I hear music.

The cast is coming out.

They emerge from the side of the church, instruments in hand.

"I'm going to have to ask you to move," says the leader to the man standing next to me. "This is my stage." She indicates the low wall I'm perching on. I shift to the other side, just avoiding a young man strumming at a guitar.

The leader of the troupe, Darrie Gardner, introduces them. They are the Left Bank players. Not to be confused with the Right Bank Players, lead by her ex-husband (they all spit to the ground at the mention of his name) and they are all one big happy family.

With a wave of their arms, they beg us to follow them.

The hoarding as been pulled back.

We're going on.

"Watch out," says a front of houser, wearing a pale blue cloak over her street-clothes.

She points down to the wooden support sticking out from the board.

"Ah," I say, raising a finger. "Thank you!" I'd almost tripped over it.

The pretty facade of St Paul's (not that one) is on our left, but we're turning right, going down the path and across the lawn over on one side.

The players chatter along with the audience as we go. "Have you been to the Festival of Fools before?" they ask.

"I like your dress," says Robert Rhodes, our Quasimodo, to a woman walking near me. "It matches the streamers."

I'm not sure that's a compliment. There are a lot of streamers here. Thousands of fabric strands hanging on strings that run between the trees. Benches have been placed around, forming an oval-shaped stage in their midst.

We all shuffle in, taking our seats where we can find them.

I would show you a photo, but I’m too scared. So here’s one I took of the St Paul's (not that one) churchyard in 2012.

I don't think I need to get into the business of the story, we've all seen the Disney version. But the leader of the Left Bank Players takes the role of narrator, introducing Quasimodo, who hangs half-way up a tree, and Esmerelda, who swirls and dances before us, and all the rest. Katie Tranter's Pierre tries to play us a ballad on her mandolele and we're all encouraged to boo her.

I'm not really into that. Not even in make-believe.

Rhodes comes down from his tree and asks a tiny girl in the front row if she'd dance with him.

She shakes her head.

Undeterred, Rhodes moves over to her sister, an equally tiny girl. This one is more than happy to join in, and the pair of them dance around together.

Izzy Jones' Esmerelda bends down next to the first tiny girl. "Are you sure you don't want to dance?" she asks, but OG tiny girl isn't having it. She shakes her head again.

As the festivities go on, the sounds of the piazza drift over from the other side of the church. The calls of the real street performers drifting on the breeze into our little Parisian enclave as Jones starts to sing.

A love song.

She opens her hand to all the pretty ladies in the front row, singing of their beauty. One of them winks back. I think she's made a conquest.

When a fight breaks out, Tranter slips into the audience, rubbing at her arm and hiding behind the small girls who do their best to shield her.

It's time to move on.

We're divided up. Half to go out one exit, half the other. And we're taken across the path to the other lawn.

More low wooden benches. This time set up either side of an aisle. We're in the gipsy encampment. Esmerelda's home.

Max Alexander-Taylor takes a seat amongst us.

An audience member dithers nearby.

"You can sit anywhere you like," he tells her. "But not this seat. It's mine."

It's starting to get cold. I pull on my jacket.

A man has been given a beanie hat to wear. Not quite a concession to the chilly evening. It has goat ears. He'll be playing the role of Esmerelda's pet. He doesn't seem upset about this. When Tranter's Pierre goes over to pet him, giving his beanie a good stroke, he preens under her attentions.

But, oh dear. Quasimodo is being led off.

Are we're being asked to follow.

Ed Bruggemeyer shows us what to do. "Shame. Shame. Shame," he chants, pointing a jabbing finger towards Rhodes.

I'm really really not into that. I follow on behind. Not chanting. Or jabbing. I'll leave the Game of Thrones recreations to the kids.

They seem to be enjoying it.

As Rhodes is stuck in the pillory, they're all brought foward and given sponges to throw.

"Wet sponges!? You said they'd be dry," shouts Rhodes at the troupe leader.

But Gardner can only shrug an apology. They must follow their art, after all.

The children all throw their sponges.

And then a cry of mercy rings out. One the audience is encouraged to join in with.

This I can get on board with.

No actor should have to suffer the indgnity of wet sponges.

But it's not all wet sponges.

The goat is brought back out to do a trick, which he performs masterfully.

And not to be outdone, Pierre reappears in a jester's outfit. "Nothing like this has been done anywhere near here," says Tranter, before showing off her juggling balls. That gets a giggle as we all wonder how many balls are being juggled on the steps out on the other side of the church.

But the giggles don't last for long, and soon there's a body on the floor.

"Nothing to see here," say the soldiers as they spread out their cloaks, hiding it from view. "Move along now."

We’re hurried out back through the hoarding, the boards closing shut behind us, sealing in the crime scene.

"Is this an interval?" someone asks the world in general.

It is.

Somehow I end up back in my old spot, on the low wall.

I should probably move.

I tuck myself up against the wall of the church, where the bunting brushes against the top of my head every time the breeze blows.

There's a queue at the bar.

A girl buys a cup full of tri-colour sweets, but a second later they're scattering over the flagstones.

"Ten-second rule," someone calls as her family scrambles to pick them all up.

I spot the goat-man. He still has his hat on. He seems rather happy with it.

"Les enfants!" The cast are back. And they've found the tiny girls again. "Would you like to join the circus?”

"Yesss!" The girls bounce around. They are well up for joining the circus.

As Esmerelda teaches them how to play a drum, the others ask their parents if they're cool with their children joining the troupe.

Turns out they are. "Of course!" I mean, who doesn't want their kid pursuing a career in the arts...

After a brief catch-up on some backstory, the boards are drawn back once more and we are off again.

This time, we're going to court.

"I need someone with a big clear voice!" calls out Tranter, while wearing a white judges' wig.

A dad points to the boy sitting in his lap.

Tranter looks unsure. "There are a lot of big words..."

But the little boy's great big eyes get the better of her and she hands them the lines. "Perhaps if you read it together..."

They do, and do it marvellously.

Goat-man says his piece too, bleating whenever his name is called.

And then it's time for the execution.

"Step. Stop. Step. Stop," calls out Bruggemeyer as he instructes us in the proper way to follow a condemned person. But by the time I get out the garden they're already well ahead. We all hurry to keep up.

"Step. Stop. Step. Stop."

"If we keep on step stopping we'll never get there," says a man hurrying next to me.

We keep on stepping, and do our best to avoid the stops. Eventually making it to the gallows.

A drop of rain lands on my cheek.

Oh dear.

I look up, and see others around me doing the same.

Another drip. Tiny. Barely noticeable.

I sit very still, waiting for the next one. But it doesn't come.

The theatre gods are having fun with us tonight.

The rain seems to have stopped though. Just in time for the battle of the church steps.

Bruggemeyer pulls out the kids from the audience to serve as Esmerelda's army, and the adults take the side of the king. But there aren't enough children on the side of right, so the rest of us are pulled over.

Buckets of sponges are handed around. They're wet.

I give it a test squidge. It leaves a dirty mark on my palm.

I try not to contemplate what they've been soaked in.

When the battle cry goes out, I lob it over to the other side, and tens of wet sponges come hurling over the other way.

I don't have the nerves for war, and soon it is a fight between the children and the actors. Both scrabbling on the floor to renew their ammo. Gardner takes shelter behind her bucket, but the children are relentless, throwing sponge after sponge in her direction.

Child armies can't last though.

And the King declares victory.

The soldiers are storming the church.

We go in, taking our pews. Red light and thick haze fills the church, giving an alarmingly fiery aura to this stand-in Notre Dame.

I needn't have worried. It gets worse.

Sword fights.

Sword fights in the church.

The echo of the blades clashing reverberating off of the walls.

I twist around in my seat, not wanting to miss a moment.

I fucking love a sword fight.

And then after a little epilogue, we're done.

The audience rises to their feet. An ovation.

We follow the cast out. The sky is dark. The air still.

Good and righteousness have been restored.

And I really need to wash my hand.

The Delegate from Legoland

Okay, so I've come to the address. 5 Pancras Square. And apparently, my theatre for tonight is Camden Council?

I've got to give it to Tête à Tête Opera Festival. They are bringing it with the locations. First taking me to someone's actual house, that they live in, for some immersive marital anguish. And now to a great big, fancy-arse office block.

I go in, through the spinny doors, because that's the sort of place this is.

The instructions said to report to the reception, but there seems to be a bunch of people wearing Tête à Tête t-shirts hanging out in the foyer, so I go over to the nearest one of them. Just to double-check.

"Hi, hello. Do I go to reception or...?"

He stares at me with an expression poised between confusion and horror, which I have to say, I've been seeing way too much on this marathon, and I'm beginning to suspect I'm a lot scarier in person than I'd been lead to believe.

"Err..?" he says.

"For God Save the Tea..." I prompt, just in case he thinks I've there for a council tax rebate.

"Err..."

Someone else steps in. "Here are you summit papers," she says, handing me a gift bag. "If you want to take a seat..." she indicates the row of benches over by the windows. "Hang on. We're just working out how to do this. If you'd just check in with my colleague here."

I'm pointed in the direction of another Tête à Tête t-shirter.

I recognise this one. She was the barefoot woman at 10 Tollgate Drive. And once again, she has a clipboard. That's a relief. You can always trust the person with the clipboard.

"Can I take your name?" she asks.

She definitely can. A second later, I'm ticked off, and I go to find a space on the bench,

Now I have a chance to look around and get a sense of this place, but to be honest, I’m not sure it's worth the effort. Sure, I mean, it's nice enough in here. Shiny. But, like... it's an office. A very large and new office, for sure. But I gave up the corporate life years ago. It's weird being back in a place like this. I try to tell myself that as long as there's an endless supply of tea available, and no one's trying to make me hotdesk... I'm happy. I do miss the properly subsidised cafe though. Fifty pee sausage sarnies for breakfast. They made the mornings go on so much better.

To distract myself, I turn my attention to the gift bag. It's the same one I got on my last Tête à Tête outing. Same brochure (incidentally I really like this. They have a section where they post reviews of past festivals, including the bad ones, which demonstrates an unselfconscious brand of humour that I really appreciate).

What else? There's a freesheet. Is that the summit paper? I’m not sure.

I put it all back in the bag.

A new Tête à Tête t-shirter starts walking along the bench, stopping every couple of people to tell them something.

"Just to let you know, we're waiting for a few people to turn up, as we all need to go up together," she tells my bench-neighbour.

"One question," he says, stopping her. "Is there somewhere to sit because I cannot stand."

She pauses. "Are their seats? Let me check." She rushes off to the other Tête à Tête t-shirters, who have gathered near the door, to ask about the setup. A second later, she's back. "Yes, it's seated," she tells him.

Good to know. My knee still has the clunk in it after my last Tête à Tête adventure.

"Excuse me!" Good lord. It's another Tête à Tête t-shirter. I'm beginning to lose count of them all. "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We are waiting on delegates from Camden Council to take us up to the eleventh floor where the summit will be taking place. The summit will be filmed, so please refrain from any scandalous behaviour. If you have to leave, please contact an administrative assistant, wearing a blue shirt." He indicates his own blue Tête à Tête t-shirt.

A new t-shirter steps forward, and she repeats the speech. This time in French.

I mean, I presume it's the same speech. My French isn't great. But it all sounds vaguely familiar content-wise.

The Camden delegates must have turned up, because we are all getting to our feet and queuing over by those swipe-card gate things you get in schmancy offices. The ones that make you feel you're tapping in your Oyster card when by rights your commute should be over.

And yes, before you ask, we do have swipey cards at my work. We're not that backward. But like, they have sensors by the door. Not turnstilley things. And most of the time stage door will buzz you in if you're having trouble finding your pass, like I do, every fucking morning. I think they just get sick of hearing me chant "gawd DAMMIT" fifty times in a row as I try to feel about for the thing at the bottom of my bag.

Anyway, I'm sure no one who works here has that problem. Bet they all turn up in beautifully fitted-suits, and blow-dried hair, and with fresh manicures, and exactly zero crumbs on their faces.

As we pass through, the Camden delegate holds up his hand. "You'll go in the second lift," he says, halting the queue. "Okay... you," he says, waving through one more so that the two children who've already got through, aren't left without a grownup on the other side of the border.

The rest of us hang back, waiting for the second lift.

This doesn't take long.

"Okay, next lot. Follow this lady," says the Camden delegate, and we are handed over to the lady.

I'll admit it. There's one thing I miss about working corporate. And that's the lifts. They're so fast. It’s literally buzzing it’s moving so quickly. Eleven floors in less than that number of seconds. It's almost alarming.

It's a proper office up here. There are desks and everything.

Through a glass window I can look all the way down to the bottom. I'm not super afraid of heights, but I take a step back all the same.

No time to dawdle though, as we being hurried through into a meeting room.

Desks have been set up, with teacups and pencils and papers. I have flashbacks to the legal conferences I worked on. Horrifying.

Those conferences didn't have flags though. And they certainly didn't have them printed up with company logos.

A woman greets us, sotto-voice, as we take our seats. "Hellooooo!" According to the freesheet, our host for this summit is Laura Hopwood.

I dither over which country I want to represent. The BP-branded Britain perhaps? Ew. No. The Ikea-screwed Sweden? Oh, someone else got their first. I make a dive for Legoland. I mean Denmark.

That seems safe enough. Right at the back.

"Oh Belgium!" Hopwood calls out as someone sits down. "Bonjour!"

Countries chosen and seats taken, we're ready to begin.

We've been invited to hear about a number of very important issues. Immigration and freedom of speech and living standards.

Our host is against all of them, and has some very strong views on the matter.

Behind her, twin screens show alarming tea-cup framed films of Boris and Maggie and Theresa, grotesque in their closeups.

Between the points on the agenda, two assistants, Mohsen Ghaffari and Tianyu Xi, run around pouring cups of tea for the audience.

"Redbush," says Hopwood. "Or rooibos as they call it... over there."

The pot only lasts long enough to fill the cups in the front row, and it takes several more agenda points for them to get round to me.

Tucked inside our agendas is a questionnaire.

"Our voters have the right to affordable housing." says question 1a.

"Would you be happy to pay higher rent and move away from the city centre just so we can accommodate more foreign unqualified people in our cities."

a) No, that's socialism.

b) I would think about it.

Tricky.

Question 1t is much more straightforward.

"Our voters have the right to a nice cup of tea."

Deffo.

It's been a while since I tried Redbush. I take a sip. I can remember why it's been so long now. Musty.

Hopwood chivvies us along to fill in our questionnaires. There must be unanimous consensus from us at the end.

But her assistants are rebelling.

They run around, stealing pencils. Throwing them on the floor and stubbing the nibs out on the desks.

They've run out of tea. They take people's cups, pouring the contents back into the pot to be served to someone else.

A delegate from Sweden goes to take a sip, but her countryman pushes her hand back down. "Don't drink that," he warns her.

The musicians, Elena Cappeletti on cello and Lucas Jordan on flute, break away to play mournful tunes, singing of life working in the factory. The assistants gather, holding tealights in their palms, their expressions solemn.

"We've heard this one before," says Hopwood, with a roll of her eyes.

But they can't be stopped.

It's mutiny on the eleventh floor.

Hopwood needs a cup of tea.

“Do you mind?” she says to one of the delegates from Italy sitting in the front row. “I don’t know why Italy is even here…”

The Italian delegate gets up and lets Hopwood have the chair. Hopwood sits down and gratefully sips the tea. I wince. How many cups has that been in.

But it seems to be working. And assistant kneels down next to her, fanning her with a leafy branch, and Hopwood soon manages to recover herself. The agenda must be got through, after all!

But there’s another problem. The assistant Ghaffari has collapsed to the floor and no amount of kicks are getting him back to his feet.

The summit is over.

We have to go.

But not before leaving our questionnaires.

A unanimous consensus must be reached after all.

I may have spoiled my ballot paper...

The creeper in your bedroom

I can't believe that there are areas of London where the trains only stop every half-hour. I truly cannot wrap my head around this. How do these people live? How do they work? How do they do anything or go anywhere? I cannot fathom living like that. And I grew up in a hamlet, with a once-weekly bus service. How do the people of Sydenham even theatre? Because that's what I'm here for, and I'm running late. My comfortable ten-minute buffer to get myself from the station to the next theatre on the marathon-list has now been compressed to six minutes. And I'm am not feeling good about the situation.

I run down the platform, dodging between some teenagers on some sort of official group outing that seems involve just hanging out on the stairs. Up the steep ramp and into the car park. Where now? Gawd dammit, Google maps is being an arse again. Okay, the blue circle has caught up. We're going left.

I race along the pavement, staring at my phone, willing the dot to move along the map screen that bit faster. My knee crunches under me, but I ignore it. There's no time for crunchy-knees right now. I've got an opera to get to.

I think it's the turning just over there. There's a guy walking ahead of me, his feet moving as fast as mine, his head bent low over his phone. Yup. I've found a fellow opera-goer.

We arch our way around the crescent, rushing along the narrow pavement, peering at each of the houses in turn. What number is that one? No. A little bit further. And look! There's a sign. Set up on an easel. With the title of the show that I can't type, so I'm going to have to copy and paste: THE鍵KEY.

This must be the place. Normal people don't set up show posters on easels outside their houses.

I turn the corner and there it is. Number 10, Tollgate Drive. My theatre for the afternoon. And someone's home the rest of the time.

Not what I expected, gotta admit.

When I booked to watch an opera in someone's private house, well... this low brick bungalow was not in the mental picture I'd put together.

But it has to be the right place. There are people out here. All hanging around. So unless there's a garage sale going on out back, this must be it.

I join the queue taking up the garden path, and a barefoot woman with a Tête à Tête Opera Festival tote slung over her shoulder makes her way down, taking names.

"Hi, it's Smiles?" I tell her when she reaches me. "I still need to pay."

Yeah. I made a bit of a boo-boo booking this one. In that I didn't book at all. I was waiting for payday. Which I really shouldn't have done. Tickets were only seven quid or so. But like, I have a lot of tickets to buy, and I tend to bulk order once a week. Get the hit on my credit card done in one big bash, so it has a few days to recover before the next round.

Anyway, it sold out. Because of course it did.

So I emailed them.

I'm not one to play the "I have a blog, you know," card all that often, but I played this one to the fullest. Begging, pleading, for a ticket. I had to. There was no other way of getting this venue. It's not like the owner of 10 Tollgate Drive will be putting on a panto in their living room come Christmas. There was once chance, and I was throwing everything I had at it to make it happen.

They put me on the waiting list.

Thankfully all my sacrifices to the theatre gods have finally built up enough karma points for them to take pity on me, and a few days ago I got an email from the people at Tête à Tête saying that there was a ticket going spare. If I wanted it.

Only the one ticket. Which was a bit of a problem as Helen had also wanted to go. But I'm nothing if not selfish in pursuit of my goals, so I took it. And didn't tell Helen. Here's hoping she doesn't read this, huh?

"You can pay by cash, or there's a card machine over there," says the barefoot woman.

"I think I have cash," I say, pulling out my purse. "Do you have change?"

She does.

"Would you like a programme?"

I would always like a programme. Especially when they're free.

She hands me an A5 card, which is a hella-swish way to do a freesheet, I must say. Full-colour printing. A satin finish and everything. Nice.

Barefoot lady points out the cloakroom. Accessed through a side door. Something tells me this is going to be one fancy-arse bungalow.

I hand over my bag. I'm already having visions of knocking over some priceless vase with it. Once I have my numbered ticket from the cloakroom lady, I'm back outside, ready to tackle the next item on my agenda.

Shoes. Or rather the lack of them.

With the confirmation of my ticket had come the warning that this is a shoes-off household.

I'd prepared as well as I could, trying on six pairs of tights this morning before finding one that didn't have holey-toes, or the evidence of my terrible darning-skills.

Unfortunately, these preparations hadn't started soon enough for my footwear. I'm living out of a suitcase at the moment. Which means I have one pair of shoes. My favourite pair of shoes. Which aren't shoes at all. They're boots. With laces. And straps. And they're a bitch to remove.

"Do you mind if I squidge in to take my shoes off," I ask the people sitting over on the long bench by the front door. A couple slid down the narrow plank to give me room. "Thanks. Sorry. I did not plan my footwear."

I wrestle with the straps and buckles and laces, and eventually manage to pull them off, and tuck them away under the bench.

Then I double-check my toes.

Phew. No holes.

The theatre gods are doing me a serious solid today.

"Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for coming," says the barefoot lady, making her way up onto the porch. "A couple of things before we go in. Can I ask you to take your shoes off." There's a shuffle as the few people who haven't got that far try to pull off their shoes without restoring to yoga-poses. An old man stumbles as he attempts to use the edge of the porch to scrape the heel of his brogues down. "There's a cloakroom and a bathroom," continues the barefoot lady. "But we ask you to use it either before or after the performance, if that's possible." Brave homeowners letting a bunch of opera-loving weirdos into their loos. Although with the whole side-door situation going on, they might just be letting us into the servants quarters. Or whatever the 2019 equivalent of that is.

"Feel free to move around the house," she continues. "We ask you not to open any doors that are closed, and to be respectful that we are in someone's home, and we are very lucky to be here. And... yeah. That's it."

Great.

That seems simple enough. It's like Punchdrunk, but we're not allowed to open drawers and rifle around in the closets.

And then someone is walking up the path.

She's dressed smartly. A cream cardigan buttoned up to the neck. Her hair pulled back with a taupe bow into a low ponytail.

She walks through us, stopping at the front door to turn around.

She introduces the tale. Telling us that when she found the key, well, that was the day everything changed.

She places her hand on the front door, and pushes it open.

She takes off her shoes, an slips on a pair of sandals, before disappearing inside.

We all look at one another. A man standing near me motions for me to go ahead.

Alright, I'll be the brave one. The first audience member to step through the door.

Inside there's a wide hallway, and beyond that a bright room with a wall full of windows overlooking the lush garden beyond.

A young woman in a smart shift dress waves her hand towards two rows of mismatched and multi-coloured cushions, laid out on the ground. We're to sit.

I take a cushion in the second row, curling my legs around to one side.

In front of us are a wall full of bookshelves, heaving with those heavy artbooks on one side, and travel guides on the other. All interspersed with interesting looking crockery. Helen would have really loved this house.

There's a desk. At which sits a man in a suit. That's Hiroshi Amako. And behind him, two musicians. One on a double bass. The other a bamboo flute.

From his desk, Amako begins to sing.

His marriage is unhappy. He's going to start keeping a diary. To record everything that happens between them.

And then he's off, leaving us, and we are left with the decision: where to go? Most people go in pursuit of the husband. But I head in the other direction, down the corridor, turning left, and in there, I find a girl. The daughter. Akari Mochuzuki.

She paces about, moving from bedroom to office. Her fingers delving into the shelves to pull free diaries, filled with sheet music.

More audience members creep in, taking up spots around the walls, shifting and moving whenever Mochuzuki comes near, not to get in her way.

The door to the front garden is open, and from across the way I can hear other voices. The husband and the wife, singing separately, but joined together by the music travelling on the breeze, overlapping and overlaying. English switching to Japanese, and back again.

But here, in this bright bedroom, the daughter sinks down onto her bed, alone. The man her mother is having an affair with, he was the guy she wanted to date.

So wrong. So many levels.

Her head drops.

It's time to go.

Back the way I had come, along the corridor, but this time I turn right. Here I find the wife, Akane Kudo. She perches on the end of a green-upholstered sofa as she tries to process everything that is happening. I'm the only one here. It's just me and her. And two musicians. My own personal concert.

Kudo gets up, moving to the kitchen. I slide along that wall so that I can keep her in sight. She pulls out a book. A diary. She tears it open, and from between the pages, a photo slips out, falling to the floor next to my feet. I step back and Kudo picks it up. A black and white image. Someone in bed. Their face towards the camera. Comfortable. Intimate. As close to the photographer as I am to Kudo.

More people start to appear. Hugging the walls as they come in.

The corridor behind me fills as people trying to keep both rooms in view - the husband on one side, the wife on the other.

And there's a fourth character now.

A dancer.

Shirtless.

Moving slowly, his back curving back as the husband sing on from his desk.

This is the wife's new beau.

I can't say I blame her...

As our dancer, Shozo Ayaka, leans down to pick up his shirt, the audience scatters once more.

Should I follow the dancer? I kinda of want to follow the dancer.

I don't follow the dancer. I'm fairly confident that would be the creepy thing to do in this situation.

Instead, I go in search of the daughter.

But I find myself caught in the corridor, as Ayaka sprawls on the floor, music pouring in from all sides.

Oh well, I'll just have to be creepy then.

When I find the wife and the boyfriend together in the bedroom, I don't even pretend not to be a voyeur anymore. I lurk in the corridor, as the wife pulls off that pristine cream cardigan, and removes the smart dress, and puts on something colourful and floaty instead. The boyfriend, skirtless again, is... apparently making love to her duvet as she changes.

Back in the main room, I watch with the husband as his wife emerges from the main room. We see her leave the bedroom, stepping out into the garden. Our eyes following her through those big windows, as her boyfriend joins her out there.

"I've never seen that dress before," comments the husband, almost as an aside.

I want to tell him that she was trying it on in front of her boyfriend, but I decide now is not the moment. He's having a hard enough time. They're kissing now. The wife and the dancer. The husband doesn't care about the dress anymore.

We're being led downstairs now.

Into a dark room, with nothing in it but a daybed, and those twin rows of cushions.

I pick one, and watch as more audience members come in, following their cast member of choice.

This must be the end game. As everyone comes together for one final scene.

The husband collapses onto the bed.

The double bass player taps out the husband's heartbeat against the hollow wood of his instrument.

And then he stops.

One by one, the lights illuminating the musicians' sheet music are turned off.

The daughter leaves, drawing closed the door behind her.

It sticks on something. She bends down and flicks it aside.

She turns the light off, and closes the door with a final click.

We are left in darkness.

Silence.

I feel the person next to me lifting their hands to clap. But they hold back. Just a second more to sit together, in the dark.

Our applause draws back the cast.

The light is switched back on.

Amako pulls the cloth that was covering his face away, and sits up grinning, alive once more.

I make my way back up the stairs, a little unsteadily.

Outside, one of the ushers is waiting, a basket full of forms and pens slung over the crook of her arm.

"Would you like to fill out a feedback form?" she asks us as we emerge.

Not for me. There's a train in nine minutes, and I am not going to miss it.

Boots on. Laces pulled and knotted. Strap buckled. And the same on the other foot.

Go. Go. Go. Go.

I won't miss it. Can't miss it. I have another show to get to and it's on Gray's Inn Road.

No time to dawdle...

"Would you like a brochure?" asks the barefoot woman as I prepare to run down the garden path.

"Oh..."

I look at her. She's holding out a white paper gift bag.

I don't really care about the brochure. I really want the gift bag.

"Yes please," I say, taking it from her.

Then I speed off, ignoring the clunking of my knee as I power-walk to the station, out of breath, but very pleased with my party-bag.

There's one thought praying on my mind thought.

A touch of guilt.

Helen really would of loved this.

Oh well.

Not my Sherlock

After months and months (and months) of monitoring the Rudolf Steiner House website, they’ve only gone and programmed a play. I thought I could get away with not visiting the theatre that lives in this building. I thought it was wall to wall lectures about strange esoteric and spiritual things that I don’t understand. But no. They’ve gone all commercial. They’ve got Sherlock Holmes in for the summer.

I’m a little bit annoyed, to be honest.

But it’s fine. I’m sure the Rudolf Steiner House is very calming.

All pale walls and the smiles of the spiriually enlightened. That’s how I’m picturing it.

Full disclosure, I have no idea who Rudolf Steiner was (or quite possibly, is…) but given the titles of the things that they usually programme “Exploring Your Intuitive Self,” “Inner Light and Strength - Nurturing Seeds of Spiritual Renewal,” “How to Protect Yourself from the Demonic attacks of Electromagnetic radiation and Vaccines”) I’m thinking he must have been some proto-Scientology dude.

Hope it doesn’t turn out like when I was offered a personality test in Totteham Court Road…

The House is just off Baker Street. Close to Regent’s Park. It looks quite nice from the outside. There’s a window filled with books down one end, and an a-frame advertising the play down the other.

Inside it is all pale walls and spiritually enlightened smiling people. There’s a counter at one end. That must be the box office. And a sort of foyer space lined with blue upholstered chairs down the other. All very hospital waiting room, except for the massive roller banner with the show artwork next to the doors to the auditorium, which I think is supposed to serve as a backdrop to any Instagrammers that float through, and dozens of show posters stuck to every available surface.

“Are you picking up tickets?” asks the man behind the counter.

“Yup!”

“What's the name?

I give my surname, spelling it out letter by letter.

He looks down for a second. “Maxine?”

That’s me!

“Great,” he says, handing me a receipt-paper ticket. The same style of ticket they have at Above the Stag. “You're in I12.”

Well, okay then. I look around, decideding what my next course of action should be. The doors are open but it’s far too early to be going in.

I decide to risk it, and sit on one of the blue chairs.

There aren’t many people here. They’re all outside, hanging out on the pavement.

I get out my phone and start editing my Jackson’s Lane post.

I hope no one tries to indoctrinate me. There’s a bit I wanted to rewrite and that’s always tricky on my phone’s touchscreen.

The man sitting closest to me says something.

I ignore him, turning to Google to double-check something.

He says something again.

I look over.

He’s staring at his phone.

He’s still talking. Or rather muttering. To himself.

He swears. He’s annoyed.

He must be editing a blog post too. I get that way sometimes.

“That’s four tickets,” says the man behind the box office, as a family waits at the counter.

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten kids loved Sherlock Holmes. I certainly did. I had all the books on tape. I used to listen to them on my way to school. Clive Merrison and Michael Williams pretty much narrated my childhood.

“Now,” says the mum, pausing dramatically. “Do you have such a thing as ice cream?”

They don’t.

Crisps? Yes. KitKat Chunkies? Yes. But not ice cream.

Oh dear. Not sure how they are going to make it through a month-long summer run of a kid-bait play without the cold stuff.

That gets me thinking about the other important theatre purchase… programmes.

There don’t seem to be any on sale. There aren’t any on display on the counter, and the ticket checker on the door doesn’t have any either.

Either there’s a programme seller inside the theatre, or programmes are against some Rudolf Steiner principal. I hope not. While I admit to being the least spiritual person in the world, composed of one part anxiety and two parts cynicism, I don’t like to think that my programme addiction is putting me in harms way of demonic attack.

Perhaps that’s why the theatre ghosts avoid me. Somehow they’ve found out about the six 35 litre boxes I’ve got filled with the things at home.

And before you say it, no, my desire to meet a theatre ghost is not a symptom of some latent spirituality. I don’t actually believe in ghosts. I grew up next to a 12th-century graveyard and never heard the slightest whisper of a WooOooOo in the night. I just want to chat to one at some point. Without the burden of belief.

I should probably go in.

I show the ticket checker my receipt.

She leans in, peering at the teeny text.

“Err…”

“It is very small,” I say.

She laughs. “Is that an I or an L?”

“It’s an I.”

She points at the door on the right. “You’re on the right,” she says.

So I turn right.

And this is it. The Rudolf Steiner Theatre in Rudolf Steiner House.

It’s a proper little theatre. There’s a stage, with a full-on proscenium arch. And raked seating set in three blocks, divided by two aisles.

I find row I and stare at the seats, trying to work out which is mine.

All the other rows seem to have their seat numbers marked by little badges applied to the bottom of the flip seat. But not row I. They must have fallen off or something.

“Do you know what number you are?” I ask a lady in my row.

She grabs the seat next to her and points to a previously unnoticed number.

“I’m 11,” she says.

I lean in, squinting at the number. “12,” it says, very faintly.

“I would never have spotted that,” I laugh. “It looks like I’m next to you then!”

From the foyer I hear the tiniest little tinkling of a faerie bell.

“Have you read any reviews of this?” asks my neighbour.

“I don’t think they’ve had press night yet,” I tell her. I know that they haven’t had press night yet. They haven’t been shy about telling us when press night is. It’s 25 July. It’s on the Rudolf Steiner website. It’s on the play’s dedicated mini-site. It’s probably on the flyers. I don’t know, I haven’t checked. But press night is 25 July.

“Yes, it’s the second performance,” says my neighbour.

“We’re going in blind.”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “That’s the risk you take, I suppose.”

Yeah, I mean. Sure. Can’t say I read reviews before a show all that much. Even in my pre-marathon days. I was usually booked in long before the critics submitted their verdicts.

Looks like I'm in the minority though, as the audience tonight is a bit thin. Small groups are scattered about the middle bank of seats. The rows all half empty due to a price banding which discourages sitting forward. Now, I'm not a fan of flat-pricing unless that flat price is somewhere in the region of fifteen quid, but I think the Sherlock-gang were a bit ambitious with their premium seats here. But hey, maybe the reviews will have this place sold out come 26 July.

Although, I'm really not sure what the press are going to make of it. It’s a strange play. We've got a Holmes and Watson, but that’s about as close to Conan Doyle as we’re getting.

There’s ghostly goings-on as a man is murdered by… an invisible thing. The only witness, a bluestocking with a penchant for whiskey, and getting one over on Holmes.

Leaves shake, pictures lose their grip on the wall, and telescopes spin on their tripods.

I keep on waiting for the Hound of the Baskervilles-twist, but no, it looks like we're really going down the whole invisible route.

It's like Mousetrap and The Woman in Black snuck into the writers' room and locked everyone else out. Add to that a sprinkle of biodegradable woke-glitter, and you have Sherlock Holmes and the Invisible Thing.

The family next to me are having a hard time coming to terms with the invisibleness of the thing too.

The keep on leaning into their mum to ask what's going on with childish whispers, and then returning to their sweets when the answer they get placates, if not entirely satisfies, them.

In the interval, I go back out into the foyer.

The pair behind the counter warn any drink-buyers that they can't take their new purchases into the auditorium.

An old lady comes in, asking about the show. "It started at 7.30pm," they tell her. "But it's on for the next month."

And there it is again. The tinkling tiny bell.

I look over. The ticket checker is ringing a brass bell. Going over to the main doors to call back into everyone hanging out on the pavement. They're not paying attention. It's not what I would call a classic theatre bell. The bells at the Royal Opera House would laugh if they saw it, before chomping it down in a single bite. It really is small. The kind of bell an infirm Victorian lady would have used to summon her dependent niece to bring thin broth and a bottle of gin in the morning.

She changes her grip, whipping the bell up and down. "I think if I do it like a town crier..." she says, showing the guy behind the box office.

"I don't think it's working," he says kindly, as exactly no one comes through the door.

She sighs. "I don't think it's working either."

"I think we need to figure out another way to do it."

Yup. I agree. You can't be using piddly little bells on theatre audiences. The thing about theatre-goers, you see, is that we all hate sitting in theatres. We will postpone the torture for as long as physically possible. Until every usher is on the brink of getting a heart attack. Think of it like letting children out of class for their morning break. They're all hopped up on custard creams and Ribena now. There's no getting them to settle down for double chemistry. Not even if you promise to show them some cool colour-change reactions. It's too late. This is why all plays should be done in 90 minutes. No interval. No bells. No-fuss. Just good clean theatre fun. And we won't even complain too much if nothing blows up.

But we do all make it back in.

I grab my jacket from where I left it on the seat and shift down to the other end of the row. It was a bit awkward sitting right there next to that family, when there is so much space going spare.

Turns out, now that i’m sitting behind someone, the Rudolf Steiner Theatre really isn't meant to be a theatre. The rake is awful.

Maybe I really should have gone for those premium seats.

I try hard to focus. There's a lot of talking going on as Sherlock explains the mystery of the invisible thing. I was so sure they were going to do a Sussex Vampire, I'm left baffled by the revelation. I mean... okay then. I guess... Fine. Whatever. It's been a long week. And like, I get that Conan Doyle wasn't available to make notes on the script. He might have told them that The Adventure of the Creeping Man wasn't his best story. But at least the narrative decisions he made in that tied into the popular perceptions of science at the time.

It was fun though.

And no one tried to recruit me into a meditation circle.

Plus I get to use Baker Street tube to get home. And that's cool.

The Two Ghosts of Queen's House

Seven o’clock starts are tricky as fuck. Especially when they’re in Greenwich. But after a slightly leg-jiggly journey on the DLR, I’ve made it to Romney Road with twenty whole minutes to spare. I can even see my theatre for tonight. Queen’s House. In all its gleaming white glory. The problem is, how to get there? The first pair of gates I passed were firmly locked. As were the second.

I keep on walking, my heart beating in time with my rushing feet. There doesn’t seem to be a way in.

Is there a password or something? Am I supposed to run full pelt at the railings with the firm believe that I can move right through them? Are iron bars nothing but an collision for those confined to the mediocrities of reality?

Just as I’m considering how badly I would hurt myself if I attempted to heave myself over the iron fence, I turn a corner, and find the car park.

Oh. Well, fine then. I’ll just go in this way, shall I?

Now I’ve actually managed to get myself within the confines of this handsome house, I can relax a little bit. I have plenty of time. And only a short walk over these peaceful green lawns.

And there it is. Queen’s House. Set back from whatever bustle Greenwich can throw at a person, amongst acres of green grass.

Not a bad place to catch a bit of opera, I must say. And a fucking impressive place for a performing arts college performance. Those Trinity Laban kids have it well swish, I can tell you that for nothing.

I stop to text Helen, letting her know about the whole getting in situation. She’s running late. Don’t want her trying to scale a fence in a panic.

That done, I walk up the path, and find a man holding a piece of paper, waiting to greet people next to a sign advertising tonight's performance.

“Do I give me name or…?” I ask.

“Are you a performer or…?”

No, mate. Clearly not. I want to ask if they’re missing a performer, but I fear he might ask me to step in. “Err, a ticket buyer?” I try.

“Right. Err let’s check if it’s here. What’s the name?”

I give it.

I’m not on the list.

“Right,” he says. It doesn’t sound like this is the first time his list has come up short. “That’s fine. I don’t know why they gave me this list. The reception is in the Orangery, around the Queen’s House, and past the colonnade.”

Well, okay then. I follow his instructions, around the house, through the colonnade, and out the other side.

There seems to be a bit of a party going on through here. There are canapes. And drinks. And everyone looks very fancy. Too fancy.

I don’t think I’m meant to be here.

I text Helen again.

“Have you crashed a wedding?” she asks.

“Maybe?” I reply.

Hmm. Not sure what to do. I go back the way I’d come, pausing in the colonnade to peer into a covered courtyard. People are walking through. Holding programmes.

Okay, so it appears that the audience are going somewhere. And unless my geography is totally messed up, they are coming from the Orangery.

I go back, stepping into the fancy room. It’s nearly empty now. The trays of canapes desiccated. The wine drunk.

A young woman with a box of tickets in her arms rushes over.

“Hello?”

“Hi, I’m picking up tickets?”

“For the reception or the performance?”

“The performance. Sorry,” I say, seeing the look of panic in her face. The expression of someone who just spotted their dotty aunt approaching a new boyfriend with a handful of embarrassing baby photos on hand. “Sorry. I got sent round here, but I was like… this doesn’t look right. So I thought I better just ask.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh no! This is just for the reception. The box office is just inside the main door. Tell them you’re general admission.”

I apologise again and back away from the fancy room. Places like this are not meant for the likes of me.

Okay then. Back around the building, I avoid the man and his piece of paper and duck into the surprisingly lowly doorway, rushing down the Spartan corridor and emerging into a museum shop. This looks much more my level. There’s a proper counter, and I join the queue to pick up tickets.

They do have my name here, thank goodness, and the lady on the desk pulls my tickets out of the box.

“That’s two tickets, is that right?” she asks.

It absolutely is.

She picks two programmes up from the pile on the counter and hands them to me.

Oh, yeah. Free programmes. That’s the stuff.

“Loos are to the left,” she says, pointing further into the building. “And stairs to the Great Hall are on the right.”

The Great Hall, eh? Perhaps I will be getting all fancy tonight.

Helen turns up a few minutes later. Limping slightly from a blister on her foot.

“This way,” I say, leading her towards the stairs.

“Hang on, do you mind if I use the loos?”

Well, you can’t say no to someone who just hobbled all the way over to Greenwich to spend the evening with you, now can you?

The last people in the foyer make their way upstairs.

I use the opportunity to take some photos. It’s strange down here. Like being in a wine cellar, with that curved ceiling going on over our heads.

“Ready?” I ask as Helen emerges.

She is, so we go up the stairs. The Tulip Stairs, according to the signage. That’s an unusually specific name, I think as we make our way up. Not that they’re not pretty, just not particularly tulip shaped… Oh. Oh, I see.

As Helen points her phone upwards to take a photo of the view above our heads, I find myself staring into a spiralling vortex of steps. They seem to go on forever, reaching up into the heaves, the steps unfolding, like, well, petals.

And on the balustrades… iron tulips.

That answers that question then.

There’s someone giving a speech in the Great Hall. Well, I presume it’s the Great Hall. There are a lot of people in here. Sat around in those spindly golden chairs you get at weddings.

A woman standing on the other side makes a big circle gesture with her arms to indicate that there are seats going spare over in the far corner.

Helen and I pick our way over between the silent rows.

Oops. Bit late.

Never mind.

The speech goes on. A potted history of the house. … I zone out. This room is far too pretty to be listening to this sort of thing. It’s the kind of room where you want murder and intrigue, not dates of construction and alignments with the river.

Once he’s done, he’s replaced by someone else. With her own set of speeches. These ones about Trinity Laban, about the operas being performed, about how marvellous the patrons are in this room for giving their money to such a worthy cause.

Someone in the front row claps loudly. The sound reverberating around the square room. The rest of us join in, more out of obligation than agreement.

I’m just here to catch some opera, and get a venue checked off.

I look up. Halfway up the high walls is a slim balcony. There are men up there. Young men. In costume. They lean against the railing, watching the audience below, looking the kind of effortless cool that only the agonisingly young and talented can achieve.

Self-congratulatory speeches now at an end, we can get on with the business of opera. First off, some Monteverdi.

The men up in the balcony begin to sing. Their voices raining down on us.

And down here, on the small bit of space being used as a stage, a lone female laments at her fate.

I don’t know what they’re singing. It’s Italian.

But I get the idea. She’s sad, and it is oh so pretty.

“I think that broke my heart?” says Helen as we all applaud.

I nod. I think it broke mine too. “It’s amazing in here,” I say. “The sound bouncing off all the walls…”

“Yes, the acoustics are great.”

“Yeah, alright. You and your big words.” Honestly, always the intellectual is our Helen. As Laban people bustle about removing the table from the last opera, and prepping the room for the next, I lean back, taking in the carved struts holding up the balcony, fat wooden scrolls picked up in gold. A bit of warmth in a white room. “It is beautiful in here. I might move in.”

“Perhaps not in winter though… I feel it would be quite hard to heat?”

She’s not wrong. Those high ceilings and cathedral sized windows would be the very devil to keep warm. “This is so going to be your summer palace when you become dictator.”

“It’s coming you know!”

I waft my hand towards the window behind us, from where we can see the long pathway going down to the river. “You’ll have peasants marching up the lawns with pitchforks.”

Helen gives a dismissive wave. “Just get rid of them,” she says.

The boys from the last opera return, slipping into empty seats and crowding into the windowsill to watch the next piece.

A young man takes the empty seat next to me, and I squish up to give him room.

These chairs are really closely packed.

Just as the boys settle, a group of young women burst in, their voices trilling and whirling as they start the next work. A modern opera this time. About a hen party. Svadba.

It takes me far too long to notice that they sing unaccompanied. With no instrument other than their own voices, and… some tins with spoons in them.

The dunk the wooden spoons in, rotating them around the insides and taping at the exterior.

Bored of their sound effects, they hand them to audience members.

A man in the front row looks at his newly acquired prop in bewilderment. “Should I tap it,” he asks the girl who gave it to him, and gives the tin an experimental drum with the spoon.

She leaves him too it.

The friends dance around their bride, the swirling sounds of their voices echoing off the walls, layering and combining into a symphonic orchestra that builds so high I can feel my ears vibrating by the end.

“Have your seen the painting in there,” says Helen as the applause fades. She’s nodding towards a side room. On the wall is the portrait of a rather dashing young man.

“He’s… well.” Very.

“He’s a bit of an alright,” says Helen.

“He’s totes a historical hottie,” I confirm.

The applause is still going, and shows no signs of stopping. The cast has long vacated the stage.

I look at Helen. She looks at me. We both shrug. I mean, they were good. Great evening. But I haven’t clapped this much since… I don’t know… Carlos Acosta’s farewell from The Royal Ballet probably. And no offence to Trinity Laban students, but they haven’t quite yet put in twenty years hard labour as world leaders in their artform.

Eventually, it slows, and stops.

“I’m going to get a photo of historical hottie,” I say, slipping between the rows to go into the side room.

“Oh look, they have ceramics,” says Helen, going to have a look at the display case. But I don’t care about them. I want attractive young men with swords and gold frogging from my art.

“I’m not sure we’re supposed to be in here,” I say. And right on cue, someone from Laban walks through. They don’t say anything though. And we’re left to gaze at the art in peace.

“Oh, look at the chairs!” I say, spotting a pair of translucent chairs.

“Oh, they’re the…”

“Ghost chairs? Is that want they’re called?”

“Yeah.”

I try to remember the name of the designer, but nope. I’ve forgotten it. Never mind. Ghost chairs. You know!

Strange addition to this room though. I wonder what they’re doing here, with historical hottie and.. I squint…a young Queen Victoria?

“We should probably go,” I suggest... I kinda want to go home while there’s still a chance of an early night.

But not before I get one final photo of the Tulip Stairs.

“Sorry,” I apologise to the couple stuck behind me.

“Don’t worry. One person took a photo and got the ghost. The Queen’s House ghost,” says the female half of the pair.

“Oh my…” Oh my! “There’s a ghost? I’ve always wanted to meet a ghost,” I tell her.

“Well, you’re in the right place,” she says, having the grace not to sound too baffled by my exclamation.

I take this as confirmation that she’d like to hear more.

“I’ve wanted to meet one for years, but I don’t think they like me,” I say. “I’m just too keen.”

“They think you’re needy,” agrees Helen.

“They do!”

The couple slips away quietly. I can’t say I blame them. If even the ghosts don’t appreciate my enthusiasm for them, I can’t expect the residents of this mortal plane to get on board.

Still, the sun is still shining and it’s only…

“That was only an hour and a quarter long,” I say to Helen as we walk down the path back towards the road. “The perfect evening!”

“And look! They’ve opened the gates for us,” she says, pointing to the end of the path.

No going through the car park for us!

We can just saunter, or at least stagger, through looking all chic in our sunglasses and…

Shit.

“Shit,” I say. “I forgot my jacket,” I say, already turning round to run back in.

Through the foyer, up the Tulip Stairs, hurried explanation of my appearance to the usher, into the Grand Hall, dart between all the singers and patrons to get to my seat right at the back, reach under, grab my jacket, nod to the usher on the way out and…

“You just wanted to see if you could find the ghost, didn’t you?” says Helen.

“No!” Yes. “And I already saw a ghost anyway. Two of them,” I say, remembering the chairs.

It's not much, but you've got to take your victories where you can find them.

Weaving the Web

I almost got away with the idea of not going to the Union Chapel. After they cancelled their summer run of Nunsense (a musical about nuns, inspired by a line of greeting cards, apparently), I was ready to scrub them off my list, but alas, when I gave their website one final check to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I spotted a show I hadn’t seen before. They must have sneaked it in when I wasn’t looking. A Web in the Heart. On for only one day. Three performances. Immersive theatre. My favourite thing.

The web copy looks intense. Not just the blurb about the show. Under all that there are six whole paragraphs worth of content warnings and access info. Loud noises. Small rooms. Blacked out spaces. Enactments of racially motivated state violence.

With the promise of further content warnings during the performance.

So a nice cheery way to spend a Sunday afternoon then.

I get there early. Doors times for theatre shows at music venues always confuse me. Am I supposed to turn up at the time on the ticket or no? Turns out no. And I definitely shouldn’t turn up even earlier than that, like muggins over here has.

Thankfully there’s a small park right next to the chapel. A slip of greenery between the church and the road. And I go plonk myself on a bench and soak in my leather jacket.

From my spot I can just about see the main doors of the Union Chapel and I keep an eye on them, waiting as people gradually turn up. They sit on the steps, turning their faces up to the sun, and generally make a show of enjoying this hell inferno that we are currently living in.

When we reach three waiters, I walk over, and lean myself against one of the bollards in the shade. But I don’t get to stay there long, as someone has come out through a side door and is making an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “If you’d like to come in here.”

Well, I for one would very much like to. So I follow him.

On the other side of the heavy wood door I find a narrow brick corridor. There’s a table set up in here as a makeshift box office.

“Are you on the list?” the box officer asks each of us in turn.

“I think I bought tickets for the later show,” someone ahead of me meekly admits.

“Oh, that’s fine,” says the box officer. “As long as you show up…”

That’s the attitude!

“Are you on the list?” she asks me when I reach the front of the queue.

“Hi, yes. The surname’s Smiles.”

She checks down her list, her pen tracing down the names. “Who did you book with?” she asks, her pen having reached the end of the page.

“Err, you? On your website.”

She looks again. “And was it for this time?”

I get out my phone and bring up the e-ticket. The time spot is blank. “It’s doesn’t say, but I definitely booked for 4.30. But it was at, like, 2pm, so maybe you’d already printed the lists?”

“Today?”

“Yes?”

“Okay,” she says, eyeing up the queue that’s been building up behind me. “I’ll check on the computer. How do you spell your surname?”

I spell it for her.

She nods. “You can go through,” she says, with a wave to the door at the end of the corridor.

I do, and it leads out into another corridor, where an usher is posted and waiting. “Just up the stairs to the bar,” she says.

Right then. Up the stairs, and into the bar. And blimey. Okay. This is… well, it’s less a bar and more of a barn. Impossibly high ceilings with wooden beams, red walls, and a massive stone fireplace.

I take a pew. Literally. Though it feels less like a thematic design choice and more of a make-use-and-mend method of furnishing the place. The other chairs on offer have more than a whiff of assisted living about them.

Gradually, the room fills up. More people turn up than I would have thought for a promenade performance about institutional racism on the sunny Sunday afternoon.

A couple of young woman take the table next to me.

“Is this a church?” one of them asks, suddenly looking around her.

“Yeah, it’s a chapel.”

“I’ve never seen a bar in a church before.”

“Oh, loads do. They’re all converting to become bars and community centres.”

“But they don’t still have services though!” she says, sounding scandalised by the very idea.

An usher comes round, hand delivering sheets of paper to the audience members.

“Programme for today,” she says, placing a freesheet on the table in front of me.

“Oh, thank you!” I do love a freesheet.

The usher moves onto my neighbours.

“Is that the stage?” one of them asks, pointing to a raised platform at one end. There’s a piano up there. And speakers.

“No,” the usher says. “It’s happening in the chapel. You’ll go through in about five minutes.”

And sure enough, five minutes later, there’s an announcement.

“Please head over to the chapel now. No alcohol is allowed in the chapel, so please finish your drinks in the bar.”

With that mixed messaging, we traipse back down the stairs the way we had come, and nip through a side door, into the chapel.

There’s someone playing piano.

And oh man… I’m not a religious person. And even if I was, I wouldn’t be Christian. But there’s something about seeing light filter through church windows that hits me right in the spiritual-zone.

As one, we all get out phones out and start aiming them upwards.

The ushers must be used to this reaction because they stand back, giving us time to take our fill of photos before gently guiding us into the first few rows of pews, where there are more pieces of paper waiting for us.

I take a seat and look what we’ve been given. It’s the words to I vow to thee my country. But different. Changed.

Oh god, I really hope they don’t make me sing. I’m not a singer. And, like, I’m a Jewish girl. Sort of. And in a church. And like, I’ve sung I vow to thee plenty of times. But that was at school. And I had to. And I hated every single enforced moment of it.

The cast come out. They sing. And then invite us to join in with them. Could I do it? Would I do it?

I compromised by standing up and mumbling along vaguely. Thankfully the cast are doing most of the work here. Good thing, as I vow to thee is a trickier hymn then most people remember, and with new words to fit into those convoluted rhythms, we needed all the help we can get.

The cast leave.

An usher comes up and starts counting.

“Right, this row,” she says, indicating the front row. “And you four,” she says, counting four people into the second row, with me as number two. “Please go through.”

“Do we leave these?” my neighbour asks, indicating the hymn seat.

“You can just put them in your seats.”

“But can I keep it?”

“Oh, yes. Keep it if you like!”

Excellent. Good on neighbour-lady for asking the important questions. I fold mine up and put it in my bag, hurrying to follow the others out though a low door and into a small foyer decked out in William Morris-esque wallpaper. From there, we move into a small room. Very small. Right. This is the room we were warned about.

We shuffle forward, but we’re bottle necking in the door, and the cast are already coming up behind us.

One of them gently pushes me aside so he can get in, and we all manage to shift and find room inside.

The two actors greet each other in delight, and then the lights go out.

Sound pounds around us. Shouting. A dog barking.

Someone near me gets out their phone and lights up the screen. Another phone appears on the other side.

The actors switch on torches. They aim them at around the room. They’re showing us something. Words. Writ large in capital letters on banners overhanging the windows. Printed in tightly spaced lines on sheets of A4 stuck to the walls.

They hand the torches over to two audience members. And then they leave, shutting the door with a click behind them.

The torch-bearers stare at their newly acquired props for a moment, but then they realise what to do. They point them at the words. Lighting the way for us to read.

Stories of detention centres. Of cruelty. Of being kept in ignorance. Personal tales of anguish and pain.

“Is everyone ready to come to the next room?” asks the usher.

We nod. We are.

There isn’t far to go this time. Just down the corridor.

A grey room, filled with rows of seats.

Without being told, we all sit down.

An actor comes in. She introduces herself. She’s not here in character. She just wants to tell us something before the scene begins. There’s going to be racist language, she tells us. “You are very welcome to leave the room, and to come back. Feel free to use this room as you wish,” she says.

When she returns, she is in character. She’s a trainee officer in a detention centre. And so are we. She plays out a scene with her instructor.

We’re given small sheets of paper. What to do if you see someone being questioned by immigration. They want to teach us how to get around these meddling bystanders. An audience volunteer joins the actors to run through a scene.

At the end, we’re graduating. Fully fledged immigration officers. We’re told to take a hat out from under our chairs. There’s nothing there. The hats are imaginary.

We put them on.

The actor who greeted us returns. Not in character.

“You don’t have to spend the rest of the performance as officers,” she assures us. “Take the hats off.”

We do.

“Just remember,” she adds. “You’ve taken your hats off now, but I haven’t.”

We’re going back up the stairs now.

An actor calls us over to the bar.

“Free Ribena!” she says, handing out glasses of the stuff. “This is a Ribena bar! Come close. Take a drink. I want to ask a favour of you…”

There are three people in the bar. Each sitting at their own tables. We’re to join them. Talk to them. Cheer them up, if we can.

I go over to a young woman weeping into her wine glass. “Mind if I join you?” I ask.

She apologises for her tears. And then she tells her story. She’s a teacher. Her pupil is starving. He can’t claim free school meals. What can she do?

I don’t have the answers.

The next table is a woman writing. A page filled with the word ARAB, over and over again. She’s raging about the laws being pushed through, about NHS staff having to report on the nationalities of their patients, about immigrants having to pay more than the treatment actually costs.

“There’s a campaign,” she says. “Docs not Cops. If you just search that…”

“Docs not Cops?” I repeat.

She nods. “There’s also a hashtag. #PatientsNotPassports,” she says with a small smile of humour at the phrase.

There’s only two other people at the next table. A young woman, and our actor. He’s a landlord. He just chucked out his tenants, because one of them didn’t have the immigration paperwork.

He doesn’t sound very remorseful about the whole thing.

“What would you do?” he asks us.

“I’d turn a blind eye,” says my fellow audience member.

I shrug. I wouldn’t be a landlord. That’s what.

I did not like him.

“I didn’t feel sorry for the landlord at all,” says the young woman as we leave for our next destination.

“I gave him a really hard time,” pipes up another audience member.

“Property-owning capitalist pig,” I inject.

We really didn’t like him.

We’re going back down to the chapel. We retake our seats in the pews. We’re going to do some Theatre of the Oppressed. I’ve never done Theatre of the Oppressed. I’ve never wanted to.

Cardboard Citizens used to bring their Theatre of the Oppressed shows to Canada Water Culture Space back when I worked there. I always felt that I should go. Just to see what it was all about. But then I’d read a description of how it all works, and I would very firmly pick up my coat at the end of the day, and make sure I was safely at home by the time it kicked off.

If you don’t know what it is, I suggest reading their website, but basically, the actors run a scene, the audience yells stop at a turning point in the story, and then the help to reshape what happens. Changing the scene to form a better outcome.

Our MC for the show steps up and explains this.

They run through the scene.

We all shout STOP.

“Right at the beginning!” says our MC. “So you know how to help things. But why didn’t our character?”

Audience members starts shouting out answers.

“Fear.”

“She feels powerless.”

“Indifference!

“And how would you show that?” the MC asks.

He jumps onto the stage. “I want you to come up here, and move the actors into position. They’ve given permission for us to touch them, but it’s nice to ask. It’s polite.” He turns to one of the actors. “May I touch you?” The actor nods. “You can pose them,” says the MC, pushing down one of the actor’s shoulders so that he's lopsided. “And you can show them. But you cannot describe what you want them to do.”

Three volunteers from the audience go up, and after asking nicely, mould their actors into the appropriate positions to convey the emotions.

“And can you help?” asks the MC. “How do we conquer these emotions?”

More people go up. They talk to the actors. Give advice.

One woman explains to the actor representing fear, that she must fake it till she makes it.

One man reads the pamphlet we were given earlier to the powerless actor, giving him the tools he needs.

The scene runs again. This time with an audience member in place of an actor. She steps in. Stopping the detention officers. Informing their target of his rights.

We all applaud.

She did very well.

And then it’s time to go. But not before we are reminded that we have to do our things our own way. That we must do what we are capable of. In whatever way we can.

Just like being an audience member, I suppose. Each of us taking part as much as we are able. Drink the Ribena, chat to the actors, but draw the line at going up on stage? That’s fine. We all have our limits.

Knowledge is power, and content warnings mean you can be prepared.

“The bar is still open, if you like,” says an usher.

I wouldn’t mind. But I have somewhere else to be.

Somewhere where the name is it’s own content warning.

I’m going to Magic Mike Live…

Miss Smiles in the library with the chaise longue

It isn’t often that you find yourself in a queue of people waiting to be let inside a library. Well, not outside finals week anyway. And that tends to involve a bit more crying and ProPlus jitters than this group displaying.

“This square’s a bit posh, isn’t it?” said Helen, dropping her voice by at least an octave as we entered the library.

That’s quite the statement from someone I literally met at the Royal Opera House.

I knew what she meant though. Walking over from work, and turning from the West End into Piccadilly is quite the shock. Streets widen, ceilings heighten, and walls whiten. It’s like stepping into a period drama. You can practically hear the rattle of carriage wheels making their way around St James’ Square.

“I wish I could have seen in back in Jane Austen’s day,” she continued in a whisper.

It’s amazing how even out-of-hours the papery-silence of a library’s atmosphere gets to you.

As if on cue, the line shifted forward, bringing into view the most extraordinary day-bed. Built on a scale suitable for giants, and upholstered in a whisky coloured leather, this seemed better suited to Byron’s hangover than Mrs Bennett’s vapour attacks, but I’m never one to pass up the opportunity presented by a fainting couch.

“Do you want me to take a photo of you on it?” asked Helen.

I pretended to consider this for a full half-second before dropping my bag and sinking myself into the squashy leather surface.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff. I need to get me one of these.

I wonder if the library would consider loaning it out to me. I’ll bring it back, I swear!

Photoshoot complete, we headed to the makeshift box office. Now, in theory I had an e-ticket, but if this marathon has taught me anything, it’s that one must always check in at the box office. You never know what you’re going to get. Like a miniature postcard with optical-illusion artwork printed on the front, and your seat numbers scrawled on the back, for instance.

“Oh my god, look at this!” I showed Helen, much to the amusement of the box office lady. “So cute!”

“You and your tickets,” laughed Helen.

Yeah, well, look. Everyone has their vices. Mine just happens to be paper-based-theatre-keepsakes. And I don’t think anyone going to see a play in a library is in any position to pass judgement on that. And the illustrated artwork is really cute. There’s no denying it. What with the little bats fluttering around, and the silhouette of Dracula himself cupping the chins of the two figures behind him.

I shouldn’t complain. Helen has gone with me to some weird spaces for the sake of my marathon: Libraries, barges, the New Wimbledon.

She also bought me a drink.

And a programme.

The woman is such a fucking angel. Seriously.

Drinks, programmes, and pretty tickets acquired, we followed the signs up the stairs to the room that would be serving as our theatre for the evening.

“Is this the main reading room?” she asked as we dumped our coats and bags.  “Look, you’re not allowed to bring laptops in here.”

“It’s very old fashioned,” I explained, staring at my assigned seat and wondering how I was going to clamber up onto it. It was a tall chair. I am not tall. Nor am I adept at climbing. I can’t see one of these things without wholeheartedly believing that I will fall off and die if I attempt to sit on it.

What can I say? I have issues.

It’s okay though. We’re working through this. You and me. Together.

Yeah, sorry to dump that on you. But I’m giving you some quality content over here, the least you can do is provide me with some unpaid therapy. Don’t worry, you don’t have to say anything. You just sit there and look pretty while I prattle on over here.

I flicked open the programme. God-lord, look at that formatting! Two-spaces after the full-stops! I thought that convention went out with the typewriter. This place really is old fashioned.

Which is exactly what I want from a library. And even more what I want for a production of Dracula.

The set, such as it is, was simple. A chaise longue (much more reasonably proportioned than the leather monstrosity lurking downstairs), a ladder, a couple of projection screens and, of course… the library itself. With its staircase and walkway and window.

“That bit in the window!” I gasped when the interval rolled around.

“The window, was amazing,” agreed Helen.

I don’t think I’ll get the image of the screen being rolled up to reveal the shadowy form of Van Helsing standing there, in the dark, peering in at us through the panes of the French window, for a long time.

“And the projections are great,” continued Helen.

“The projections are great.”

“The way they are integrated into the work.”

“Absolutely.” I paused. “Doesn’t he look like Matthew Ball?” I said, referring to The Royal Ballet principal.

“Oh my god, he does look like Matthew Ball.”

“It’s the eyes.”

“And the hair.”

“I like him.”

“Me too.”

“And not just because he looks like Matthew Ball.”

Helen looked at me skeptically.

“I like her too,” I said hurriedly. “She has the most gorgeously vintage face.”

“She does have a very vintage face.”

“They’re both great.”

“They are.”

I reached down for my bag in an attempt to hide my flusters.

“I’m just going to get a photo of that calendar,” I said, slipping off the chair and scuttling over to the wooden pillar which housed a set of date cards.

This place is so, so old-fashioned.

I love it so hard.

Unfortunately, my little crush on both of the cast members only increased during the second act on the reappearance of the window.

The screen was whipped away. The window opened.

They began to climb out onto the roof.

I gasped. They couldn’t do that! It was raining! They weren’t even wearing coats!

When they reappeared I had to sit on my hands in an effort to stop myself from running after the pair of them with a warm scarf.

The sight of her skirt covered in rain droplets made my heart ache.

I wanted to bake biscuits for the pair of them.

You know I’ve got it bad when I want to bake for people. It’s the Jewish grandmother in me.

They were really cute though.

I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate to get a case of the warm fuzzies from a production of Dracula, but what can I say… it’s the Goth in me.

It was still raining when we left the library.

Somehow it’s less romantic when it’s you being rained on.

And don’t have anyone to bake biscuits for you.