Burning rubber ... our tour van
The tour is two weeks old and we've driven 1,944 miles through four countries in our dirty white Mercedes Sprinter.
On Tuesday (so it must have been Switzerland) heading from the Langenthal Stadttheater back to the hotel, my colleague Gehane (Clarisse) said: "Did we sleep at this hotel last night or are we just arriving?" I understand how she feels. Van life manages to both stretch and condense time.
There's a line in the show where I (as Beatty) say to Glyn (Montag): "Whirl a man's head fast enough and nothing sticks." I know the feeling.
What to do, in the dark, for eight hours, between Rasthof stops? Deborah (Mildred) is embroidering her Made in England flower pattern cushion. Glyn is reading Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom aloud to Gehane, who is nodding off in her camouflage sleeping bag, and I'm trying to read The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor - though I too am usually nodding off.
And Rene? (He's taken over from Oli as our road manager for a month.) Rene is driving, driving, driving ... We're becoming very familiar with the various voices on the satellite navigation system. The voice we've called Barbara is a little stern as she demands we turn left in 83.5m, her opposite number Tom a touch smarmy with his "continue for 300km", but they lull us to sleep and enter our dreams.
We now have six versions of the play, all with (or without) an interval. But one show this week was nearly a lot shorter. On Friday morning (so it must have been Germany) at the Kornhaus Theater in Kempten, Gehane, who at the end of the first half is struck by a speeding fire engine driven by me, not only slid skilfully across the stage as normal, but continued full pelt over the edge and landed with some force at the feet of a gasping public. She picked herself up and staggered backstage with her best "I'm still moving but I may be about to die" acting.
Montag and I just stared, wondering whether to call a halt to things or carry on with the "drama". Two paramedics rushed backstage, were waved away by a shaken but unbowed Clarisse and on we ploughed. Afterwards she had an enormous splinter removed from her hand and we put white tape on the edge of the stage.
The sight of Clarisse dragging herself off, hurt or acting hurt, is now all part of the whirl and real life is blurring with fiction.
