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.
